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DR. HOLMES'S BOSTON 



Dr. Holmes starting on his Morning Walk in November, 1893 



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DR. HOLMES'S BOSTON 



EDITED BY 



CAROLINE TICKNOR 



WITH ILLUSTRATIONS 




BOSTON AND NEW YORK 

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 

MDCCCCXV 






COl'YRIGHT, 1915, BY HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 
ALL KIGHTS RESERVED 

Published October iqi^ 



©CI.A4119I0 



OCT II 1915 



PREFACE 

Dr. Holmes was in truth the poet-laureate of 
Boston. He early won the laurels which were placed 
on his brow by his appreciative fellow-citizens, and 
these he wore triumphantly until the end. And in 
turn he crowned Boston with literary offerings such 
as no other citizen has bestowed in like measure. 
The spirit of New England has doubtless been pre- 
sented in prose and verse by other sons and daugh- 
ters, but no one else has given us so much of Boston 
from the Bostonian point of view. 

Except for a brief interim Dr. Holmes passed all 
of his years in Boston, "tethered," it has been said, 
close to the State House, whose gilded dome he has 
immortalized in literature. All of his intimates lived 
within a few miles of him, and his useful activities 
were confined to his own community. Unlike so 
many prominent men of letters, he was in no way 
connected with diplomatic or political affairs; he 
held no public office, and his cheerful, useful career 
progressed in even, tranquil measures "in his own 
place." Seated in honor at the head of his Boston 
[ v] 



PREFACE 

breakfast-table, the Autocrat looked out upon the 
broad expansive universe and in inimitable lan- 
guage discoursed upon its problems, pointed out, 
with a roguish finger, its eccentricities, touched 
gently upon its sorrows, and with his flow of wit and 
wisdom enlivened and instructed the minds and 
spirits of the ever- widening circle of his table com- 
panions. 

Dr. Holmes's Boston is the Boston of the entire 
nineteenth century, barring its opening and clos- 
ing decades, and in his varied disquisitions he has 
reflected its characteristics, changes, and gradual 
expansion. His Boston was not merely a place, it 
was also a very individual "state-of-mind," and the 
immortal Autocrat not only voiced that mental at- 
titude, but also did much to influence its trend and 
shape its course. Holmes was, no doubt, to some 
extent, what Boston made him, and Boston to-day 
bears the vivid imprint left by the personality of 
him who christened it the "Hub." 

"Surely this is the ideal civic bard," exclaimed 
Edmund Clarence Stedman, "who at the outset 
boasted of his town, — 

" The threefold hill shall be 
The home of art, the nurse of liberty, — 

[ vi ] 



PREFACE 

" and who has celebrated her every effort, in peace 
or war, to make good the boast. He is an essential 
part of Boston, like the crier who becomes so identi- 
fied with a court that it seems as if Justice must 
change quarters when he is gone. The Boston of 
Holmes, distinct as his own personality, certainly 
must go with him. Much will become new when old 
things pass away with the generation of a wit who 
made a jest that his State House was the hub of the 
solar system, and in his heart believed it. The time 
is ended when we can be so local; this civic faith 
was born before the age of steam, and cannot out- 
last, save as a tradition, the advent of electric 
motors and octuple sheets. Towns must lose their 
individuality, even as men, — who yearly differ 
less from one another. Yet the provincialism of 
Boston has been its charm, and its citizens, striving 
to be cosmopolitan, in time may repent the efface- 
ment of their birth-mark." 

The following compilation aims to present the 
*' Boston of Holmes," as set forth by himself. The 
many passages dealing with this his favorite topic 
have been gleaned from his entire works and have 
been fitted together in chronological order. Thus 
the Boston flavor, which permeates the Doctor's 
[ viil 



PREFACE 

work throughout, is now for the first time presented 
in concentrated form. His scattered reflections and 
picturesque descriptions, when pieced together, 
furnish an almost consecutive story of nineteenth- 
century Boston. And with this revelation of "Dr. 
Holmes's Boston" is bound up a characteristic 
picture of "Boston's Dr. Holmes," for, though it is 
at best a fragmentary piece of work, its autobio- 
graphical interest goes far toward proving the 
truth of the saying attributed to the wise Doctor, 
that " an autobiography is what a biography ought 
to be." 



CONTENTS 

I. Childhood and College Days ... 1 

II. Habits and Habitations .... 29 

III. Boston in War Times 47 

IV. The Coliseum and the Boston Fire . 67 
V. Boston versus England 91 

VI. "The Hub" 109 

VII. Boston the Lecture Cradle . . . 129 

VIII. Boston the Bookish 151 

IX. Boston Elms and the Long Path . . . 169 

X. Farewell, Boston 189 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

Dr. Holmes starting on his Morning Walk in No- 
vember, 1893 Frontispiece 

He is just leaving his house at 296 Beacon Street. 

The State-House Dome Title-Page 

"Boston State House is the hub of the solar system. You 
could n't pry that out of a Boston man if you had the tire of all 
creation straightened out for a crowbar." The State House was 
built by Charles Bul6nch, architect, in 1795-98. The dome was 
at first entirely of wood; it was covered with copper in 1802 and 
was first gilded in 1874. The present cupola, a reproduction of 
the original one, was built in 1897. The one shown in the picture 
was built in 1859. 

From the collection in the Boston Public Library. 

The Gambrel-rooped House 6 

Dr. Holmes's birthplace in Cambridge. Built in 1730; torn 
down after the death of the Doctor's mother in 1862. It was Gen- 
eral Ward's headquarters in the Revolution, and General Warren 
slept there before the Battle of Bunker Hill. 

Old Latin School, Bedford Street, 1860 ... 20 

Built in 1844 and torn down in 1879. The famous teacher 
Francis Gardner was head-master here for many years, and here 
Phillips Brooks taught immediately after leaving college. 
From the collection in the Boston Public Library. 

View from the State House looking West, showing 
THE Back Bay before it was filled in . . .38 

The filling began in 1857. 

From the collection of Mr. Bernard P. Verne. 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

Summer Street in 1846, showing Trinity Church, 
WITH Park Street Steeple in the Distance . 42 

From a water-color drawing by Sarah Hodges Swan after a 
painting by N. Vautin. The painting was made from a pencil 
sketch by Sarah Hodges in 1846. The water-color is in the pos- 
session of Dr. William Donnison Swan, of Cambridge. 

Beacon Street in Dr. Holmes's Time .... 44 

The square house on the corner of Walnut Street, the second 
street down, is the old Phillips house, where the abolitionist Wen- 
dell Phillips was born. 

From the collection in the Boston Public Library. 

Colonnade Row, Tremont Street, opposite the 
Common, in 1860 50 

From the collection in the Boston Public Library. 

Daniel Webster's House, at the corner of High 
and Summer Streets 54 

Summer Street at this time was one of the finest residential 
streets of Boston. 

West Street in 1860, looking towards Bedford 
Street 60 

On the left is a glimpse of the Washington Gardens at the cor- 
ner of Tremont Street. The opposite corner was occupied by the 
Amos Lawrence house. 

From the collection in the Boston Public Library. 

The Coliseum op the Peace Jubilee of 1869 . .70 

The street-corner shown in the foreground is that of Boylston 
Street (left) and Clarendon Street (right) . The site of the Coli- 
seum is now occupied by Copley Square, Huntington Avenue, 
Trinity Church, etc. 

From the collection of Mr. Bernard P. Verne. 

The Boston Fire of November 9-10, 1872 ... 80 

The view extends from the post oflSce (then in process of con- 
struction) on the left to Summer Street on the right. 
From the collection in the Boston Public Library. 

[ xii ] 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

State Street, from an Engraving made about 1842 96 

Tke lion and unicorn of Colonial days have since been restored 
in place of the ornamental scrolls at the corners of the Old State 
House. 

From the collection in the Boston Public Library. 

Park Street Church 100 

Built in 1809. From the quality of the theology preached here, 
this came to be known as "Brimstone Corner." 
From the collection of Mr. Bernard P. Verne. 

Boston from the Public Garden, about 1880 . .104 

The spire seen near the State House is that of the First Baptist 
Church on Somerset Street, torn down in 1882. 
From the collection in the Boston Public Library. 

The Frog Pond 114 ' 

The introduction of Boston's first city water service was cele- 
brated here, October 25, 1848. The Soldiers' Monument, by Mar- 
tin Milmore, was erected in 1877 in memory of the soldiers and 
sailors killed in the War for the Union. 

From the collection in the Boston Public Library. 

The Old City Hall, 1858 120 ' 

This was formerly the Court-House. It was fitted up as the City 
Hall in 1840-41. The present building was erected on the same 
site in 1862-65. 

The Hancock House, on Beacon Street next to 
THE State House 124 

Built in 1737 by Thomas Hancock and later occupied by his 
nephew John Hancock. It was torn down in 1863. 
From the collection in the Boston Public Library. 

The Old South Church 136'' 

Built in 1729-30. Joseph Warren in March, 1775, made his fa- 
mous address here in defiance of the threats of British officers, and 
in the same year the church was desecrated by the British, who 
used it for cavalry drill. It has not been used for religious services 

[ xiii ] 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

since the building of the New Old South Church in 1873-75, but 
it is maintained for lectures and the exhibition of antiquities by a 
fund raised to secure its preservation. 

From the collection in the Boston Athenaeum. 

The Beacon Street Side of the Public Garden in 
1857, SHOWING Dr. Holmes and Ralph Waldo 
Emerson in Conversation 142 

From the collection in the Boston Athenaeum. 

/ 

Park Street from the State-House Grounds . . 156 

The George Ticknor house is shown on the left. 
From the collection in the Boston Public Library. 

The Museum of Fine Arts, Copley Square . .166 

The Museum was founded in 1870, and the building was com- 
pleted in 1879. Sturgis & Brigham were the architects. It was 
torn down in 1911, the collections being removed to the new 
building farther out on Huntington Avenue, and the Copley 
Plaza Hotel was erected on the site. 

From the collection in the Boston Athenaeum. 

Tremont Street Mall, now called Lafayette 
Mall, Boston Common 172 

Showing the elms removed when the subway was built. 
From the collection ip the Boston Public Library. 

The Old Elm, Boston Common 182 

It was over 72 feet high and 22| feet in circumference a foot from 
the ground, and was supposed to have antedated the founding of 
Boston. It blew down in a gale, February 15, 1876. A scion, 
now a sizable and vigorous tree, is growing on the site. 
From the collection in the Boston Public Library. 

The Tremont House, 1886 184 

Built in 1828-29 and torn down in 1895 to make place for the 
Tremont Building, which was erected the following year. The Old 
Granary Burying-Ground is seen on the left. 

[ xiv ] 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

The Long Path, Boston Common 186 

This path, now known officially as Oliver Wendell Holmes Walk, 
runs from opposite Joy Street to the corner of Tremont and Boy Is- 
ton Streets. The view is of the upper end, looking towards Bea- 
con Street. 

From the collection in the Boston Athenaeum. 

The Gardiner-Green House, Pemberton Square . 194 ' 

Built by William Vassall about 1758. In 1803 it came into the 
possession of Gardiner Green, the wealthiest citizen of Boston in 
his day. It appears in Cooper's novel "Lionel Lincoln" as the 
house of Mrs. Lechmere. When it was torn down in 1835, the 
famous gingko, or ginkgo, tree which adorned its grounds was 
transplanted through the agency of Dr. Jacob Bigelow to the 
Joy Street end of the "Long Path" on Boston Common. The 
site of the house is now occupied by the Court-House. 

From a painting by Pratt in 1833, now in the possession of 
Frederic Amory, Esq. 

King's Chapel, 1860 202 

Built in 1749-5-t. This was Dr. Holmes's place of worship. He 
occupied Pew 102 in the front centre of the south gallery. 
From the collection in the Boston Public Library. 

The Old North Church, Salem Street . . . 208 

Now called Christ Church. The view is from Hull Street and 
shows Copps Hill Burying-Ground on the left. The corner-stone 
was laid in 1723. It was in the belfry of this church that the lan- 
terns were hung that gave the signal to Paul Revere on the night 
of the 18th of April, 1775. The church was restored in 1912 under 
the direction of Bishop William Lawrence. 

From the collection in the Boston Public Library. 



DR. HOLMES'S BOSTON 

CHAPTER I 

CHILDHOOD AND COLLEGE DAYS 

1809-1830 



From the first gleam of morning to the gray 

Of peaceful evening, lo, a life unrolled ! 

In woven pictures all its changes told, 

Its Ughts, its shadows, every flitting ray, 

Till the long curtain, falling, dims the day. 

Steals from the dial's disk the sunlight's gold, 

And all the graven hours grow dark and cold 

When late the glowing blazes of noontide lay. 

Ah! the warm blood runs wild in youthful veins, — 

Let me no longer play with painted fire; 

New songs for new-born days ! I would not tire 

The listening ears that wait for fresher strains 

In phrase new-moulded, new-forged rhythmic chains 

With plaintive measures from a worn-out lyre. 



DK. HOLMES S BOSTON 

CHAPTER I 

CHILDHOOD AND COLLEGE DAYS 
1809-1830 

I KNOW that it is a hazardous experiment to ad- 
dress myself again to a pubhc which in days long 
past has given me a generous welcome. But my 
readers have been, and are, a very faithful constitu- 
ency. I think there are many among them who 
would rather listen to an old voice they are used to 
than to a new one of better quality, even if the 
"childish treble" should betray itself now and then 
in the tones of the over-tired organ. But there 
must be others, — I 'm afraid many others, — who 
will exclaim, "He has had his day, and why can't 
he be content.^ We don't want any literary reve- 
nants, superfluous veterans, writers who have worn 
out their welcome and still insist on being attended 
to. Give us sofne thing fresh, something that be- 
longs to our day and generation." 

Alas, alas! my friend, — my young friend, for 
your hair is not yet whitened, — I am afraid you 
[3] 



DR. HOLMES'S BOSTON 
are too nearly right. . . . But suppose that a writer 
who has reached and passed the natural hmit of 
serviceable years feels that he has some things 
which he would like to say, and which may have 
an interest for a hmited class of readers, — is he 
not right in trying his powers and calmly taking 
the risk of failure .^^ 

I confess that there is something agreeable to me 
in renewing my relations with the reading pubhc. 
Were it but a single appearance, it would give me a 
pleasant glimpse of the time when I was known as 
a frequent literary visitor. Many of my readers — 
if I can lure any from the pages of younger writers 
— will prove to be the children, or the grandchil- 
dren, of those whose acquaintance I made something 
more than a whole generation ago. I could depend 
on a kind welcome from my contemporaries, — my 
coevals. But where are those contemporaries .^^ Ay 
de mi! as Carlyle used to exclaim, — "Ah, dear me," 
as our old women say, — I look round for them and 
see only their vacant places. 

It will not do for us to boast about our young 
days and what they had to show. It is a great deal 
[ 4 1 



CHILDHOOD AND COLLEGE DAYS 

better to boast about what they did not show, and, 
strange as it may seem, there is a certain satisfac- 
tion in it. In these days of electric hghting, when 
you have only to touch a button and your parlor or 
bedroom is instantly flooded with light, it is a pleas- 
ure to revert to the era of the tinder-box, the flint 
and steel, and the brimstone match. It gives me an 
almost proud satisfaction to tell how we used, when 
those implements were not at hand, or not em- 
ployed, to light our whale-oil lamp by blowing a 
live coal held against the wick, often swelUng our 
cheeks and reddening our faces until we were on 
the verge of apoplexy. I love to tell of our stage- 
coach experiences, of our sailing-packet voyages, of 
the semi-barbarous destitution of all modern com- 
forts and conveniences through which we bravely 
lived and came out the estimable personages you 
find us. 

Think of it! All my boyish shooting was done 
with a flint-lock gun; the percussion lock came to 
me as one of those new-fangled notions people had 
just got hold of. We ancients can make a grand 
display of minus quantities in our reminiscences, 
and the figures look almost as well as if they had 
the plus sign before them. 
[5 1 



DR. HOLMES'S BOSTON 

In the last week of August used to fall Com- 
mencement day at Cambridge. I remember that 
week well, for something happened to me once at 
that time, namely, I was born. 

[This notable event occurred upon the twenty-ninth 
of August, 1809, a year which was productive of many 
famous personages; Gladstone, Tennyson, Darwin, and 
Abraham Lincoln all first saw light within this memora- 
ble twelvemonth. 

In the "old gambrel-roofed house," where Holmes 
was born, lurked many historic memories ; there General 
Ward made his headquarters in Revolutionary days; 
its threshold was often crossed by Washington, and 
General Warren slept there prior to the battle of Bunker 
Hill. In this old homestead young Holmes dwelt until 
he reached years of maturity, when after his mother's 
death, it was torn down, leaving him to deplore its 
passing although he readily acknowledged it was "a 
case of justifiable domicide."] 

Our old house is gone. I went all over it, into 
every chamber and closet, and found a ghost in 
each and all of them, to which I said good-by. I 
have not seen the level ground where it stood. 
Be thankful that you still keep your birthplace. 
This earth has a homeless look to me since mine 
has disappeared from its face. 

I remember saying something, in one series of 
papers published long ago, about the experience 
16] 



The Gambrel-roofed House 



CHILDHOOD AND COLLEGE DAYS 

of dying out of a house, — of leaving it forever, as 
the soul dies out of the body. We may die out of 
many houses, but the house itself can die but once; 
and so real is the life of a house to one who has 
dwelt in it, more especially the life of the house 
which held him in dreamy infancy, in restless boy- 
hood, in passionate youth, — so real, I say, is its 
life, that it seems as if something like a soul of it 
must outlast its perishing fame. 

When the chick first emerges from the shell, the 
Creator's studio in which he was organized and 
shaped, it is a very little world with which he finds 
himself in relation. First the nest, then the hen- 
coop, by and by the barnyard with occasional pred- 
atory incursions into the neighbor's garden — 
and his little universe has reached its boundaries. 

Just so with my experience of atmospheric exis- 
tence. The low room of the old house — the little 
patch called the front yard — somewhat larger 
than the Turkish rug beneath my rocking-chair — 
the back yard with its wood-house, its carriage- 
house, its barn, and, let me not forget its pig-sty. 
These were the world of my earliest experiences. 
But from the western window of the room where I 
was born I could see the vast expanse of the Com- 
[7] 



DR. HOLMES'S BOSTON 

mon, with the far-away "Washington Elm" as its 
central figure — the immeasurably distant hills of 
the horizon, and the infinite of space in which these 
gigantic figures were projected — all these, in un- 
worded impressions — vague pictures swimming by 
each other as the eyes rolled without aim — threw 
the lights and shadows which floated by them. 
From this centre I felt my way into the creation 
beyond. 

Although the spot of earth on which I came into 
being was not as largely endowed by nature as the 
birthplaces of other children, there was yet enough 
to kindle the fancy and imagination of a child of 
poetic tendencies. My birth-chamber and the 
places most familiar to my early years looked out 
to the west. My sunsets were as beautiful as any 
poet could ask for. Between my chamber and the 
sunsets were hills covered with trees, from amid 
which peeped out here and there the walls of a 
summer mansion, which my imagination turned 
into a palace. The elms, for which Cambridge was 
always famous, showed here and there upon the 
Common, not then disfigured by its hard and pro- 
saic enclosures; and full before me waved the luxu- 
rient branches of the "Washington Elm," near 
[8] 



CHILDHOOD AND COLLEGE DAYS 
which stood the handsome mansion then Hved in 
by Professor Joseph McKean, now known as the 
Fay House, and the present seat of RadcHffe 
College. 

Know old Cambridge? Hope you do. — 
Bora there? Don't say so! I was, too. 
(Born in a house with a gambrel-roof, — 
Standing still, if you must have proof.) 

Nicest place that was ever seen, 
Colleges red and Common green, 
Sidewalks brownish, with trees between, 
Sweetest spot beneath the skies. 
When the canker-worms don't rise, — 
When the dust, that sometimes flies 
Into your mouth and ears and eyes. 
In a quiet slumber lies. 
Not iu the shape of unbaked pies 
Such as barefoot children prize. 

A kind of harbor it seems to be, 
Facing the flow of a boundless sea. 
Rows of gray old Tutors stand 
Ranged like rocks upon the sand; 
Rolhng beneath them, soft and green. 
Breaks the tide of bright sixteen, — 
One wave, two waves, three waves, four, — 
Sliding up the sparkUng floor: 
Then it ebbs to flow no more. 
Wandering off from shore to shore 
With its freight of golden ore! 

[9] 



DR. HOLMES'S BOSTON 
My boyhood had a number of real sensations. 
. . . An mspiring scene, which I witnessed many 
times in my early years, was the imposing triumphal 
entry of the Governor attended by a light-horse 
troop and a band of sturdy truckmen, on Com- 
mencement day. Vague recollections of a "muster,'* 
in which the "pomp and circumstance of glorious 
war" were represented to my young imagination. 
But my most vivid recollections are not associated 
with war but with peace. My earhest memory goes 
back to the Declaration of Peace, signahzed to me 
by the illumination of the College in 1815. I re- 
member well coming from the Dame school, throw- 
ing up my "jocky," as the other boys did, and 
shouting "Hooraw for Amirikj^" looking at the 
blazing College windows, and revelling in the 
thought that I had permission to sit up as long as 
I wanted to. I lasted until eight o'clock, and then 
struck my colors, and was conveyed by my guardian 
and handmaiden from the brilhant spectacle to 
darkness and slumber. 

The social habits of our people have undergone an 
immense change within the past half centurj", largely 
in consequence of the vast development in the means 
of intercourse between different neighborhoods. 
[ 10] 



CHILDHOOD AND COLLEGE DAYS 
Commencements, college gatherings of all kinds, 
church assemblages, school anniversaries, towTi 
centennials, — all possible occasions for getting 
crowds together are made the most of. " 'T is sixty 
years since," and a good many years over, — the 
time to which my memory extends. The great days 
of the year were. Election, — General Election on 
Wednesday, and Artiller^^ Election on the Monday 
following, at which time lilacs were in bloom and 
'lection buns were in order; Fourth of July, when 
strawberries were just going out; and Commence- 
ment, a grand time of feasting, fiddling, dancing, 
jollity, not to mention drunkenness and fighting, 
on the classic green at Cambridge. This was the 
season of melons and peaches. That is the way our 
boyhood chronicles events. It was odd that the 
literary festival should be turned into a Donny- 
brook fair, but so it was when I was a boy, and the 
tents and the shows and the crowds on the Common 
were to the promiscuous many, the essential parts 
of the great occasion. They had been so for genera- 
tions, and it was only gradually that the Cam- 
bridge Saturnalia were replaced by the decencies 
and solemnities of the present sober anniversary. 
Nowadays our celebrations smack of the Sunday 
[ 11 ] 



DR. HOLMES'S BOSTON 

school more than of the dancing-hall. The aroma of 
the punch-bowl has given way to the milder flavor 
of lemonade and the cooling virtues of ice-cream. 
A strawberry festival is about as far as the dissipa- 
tion of our social gatherings ventures. There was 
much that was objectionable in those swearing, 
drinking, fighting times, but they had a certain ex- 
citement for us boys of the years when the century 
was in its teens, which comes back to us not without 
its fascinations. The days of total abstinence are 
a great improvement over those of unlicensed 
license, but there was a picturesque element about 
the rowdyism of our old Commencement days, 
which had a charm for the eye of boyhood. 

They had not then the dainty things 
That commons now afford, 
But succotash and hominy 
Were smoking on the board; 
They did not rattle round in gigs, 
Or dash in long-tailed blues, 
But always on Commencement days 
The tutors blacked their shoes. 

God bless the ancient Puritans ! 
Their lot was hard enough 
But honest hearts make iron arms, 
And tender maids are tough; 

[ 12] 



CHILDHOOD AND COLLEGE DAYS 

So love and faith have formed and fed 
Our true-born Yankee stuff, 
And keep the kernel in the shell 
The British found so rough ! 

The firing of the great guns at the Navy-yard is 
easily heard at the place where I was born and Hved. 
"There is a ship of war come in," they used to say, 
when they heard them. Of course, I supposed that 
such vessels came in unexpectedly, after indefinite 
years of absence, — suddenly as falling stones; and 
that the great guns roared in their astonishment 
and dehght at the sight of the old war-ship splitting 
the bay with her cutwater. Now, the sloop-of-war, 
the Wasp, Captain Blakely, after gloriously captur- 
ing the Reindeer and the Avon, had disappeared 
from the face of the ocean, and was supposed to be 
lost. But there was no proof of it, and, of course, for 
a time, hopes were entertained that she might be 
heard from. Long after the last real chance had 
utterly vanished, I pleased myself with the fond 
illusion that somewhere on the waste of waters 
she was still floating, and there were years during 
which I never heard the sound of the great gun 
booming inland from the Navy-yard without say- 
ing to myself, "The Wasp has come!" and almost 
[13] 



PR. HOLMES'S BOSTON 
thinking I could see her as she rolled in, crumpling 
the water before her, weather-beaten, barnacled, 
with shattered spars and threadbare canvas, wel- 
comed by the shouts and tears of thousands. This 
was one of those dreams that I nursed and never 
told. 

Do you know, dear reader, that I can remember 
the great September gale of 1815, as if it had blown 
yesterday.5^ . . . The 23d of September, 1815. It 
was an awful blow. Began from the east, got round 
to the southeast, at last to the south, — we have 
had heavy blows from that quarter since then, as 
you suggest with your natural pleasant smile. It 
tore great elms up by the roots in the Boston Mall, 
in the row Mr. Paddock planted by the Granary 
Burial-ground. What was very suggestive, the 
English elms were the chief sufferers. The American 
ones, slenderer and more yielding, renewed the old 
experience of the willows by the side of the oaks. 

The wind caught up the waters of the bay and of 
the river Charles, as mad shrews tear the hair from 
each other's heads. The salt spray was carried far 
inland, and left its crystals on the windows of farm- 
houses and villas. I have, besides more specific 
[ 14 1 



CHILDHOOD AND COLLEGE DAYS 
recollections, a general remaining impression of 
a mighty howling, roaring, banging, and crashing, 
with much running about, and loud screaming of 
orders for sudden taking in of all sail about the 
premises, and battening down of everything that 
could flap or fly away. The top-railing of our old 
gambrel-roofed house could not be taken in, and 
it tried an aeronautic excursion, as I remember. 
Dreadful stories came in from scared people that 
somehow managed to blow into harbor in our man- 
sion. Barns had been unroofed, "chimbleys" over- 
thrown, and there was an awful story of somebody 
taken up by the wind and slammed against some- 
thing with the effect of staving in his ribs, — fearful 
to think of! It was hard travelling that day. . . . 
Boston escaped the calamity of having a high tide 
in conjunction with the violence of the gale, but 
Providence was half drowned, the flood rising 
twelve or fourteen feet above the high- water mark. 
... It is something to have seen or felt or heard the 
great September gale. 

I 'm not a chicken, I have seen 
FuU many a chill September, 
And though I was a youngster then. 
That gale I well remember; 

[ 15 ] 



DR. HOLMES'S BOSTON 

The day before, my kite-string snapped, 
And I, my kite pursuing. 
The wind whisked ojBE my palm-leaf hat; 
For me two storms were brewing! 

It chanced to be our washing-day. 

And all our things were drying; 

The storm came roaring through the lines. 

And set them all a flying; 

I saw the shirts and petticoats 

Go riding ofiE like witches; 

I lost, ah ! bitterly I wept, — 

I lost my Sunday breeches! 

We used to receive into the family as "help," as 
they used to be called, young men and women 
from the country. From the men and boys, young 
persons of both sexes, I learned many phrases and 
habits of superstition, and peculiarities character- 
istic of our country people. They did not like to be 
called servants, did not show great alacrity in an- 
swering the bell, the peremptory summons of which 
had something of command in its tone, which did 
not agree with the free-born American. 

Many expressions which have since died out were 
common in my young days, — " haowsen " for houses, 
"The haunt" for Nahant, " musicianers " for musi- 
cians. They had their Farmer's Almanac, their broad- 
[ 16] 



CHILDHOOD AND COLLEGE DAYS 

sheets telling the story of how the " Constitootion " 
took the "Guerrier," and other naval combats. 

They had their specific medicines, of which "hiry 
pikry " (hierapicra — sacred bitters) was a favorite. 
Some of the country customs were retained. "Husk- 
ing " went on upon a small scale in the barn. The 
habits of parlor and kitchen with reference to alco- 
holic fluids were very free and hazy. In the parlor 
cider was drunk as freely as water; wine was always 
on the table at dinner, and not abstained from; and, 
in the kitchen, cordial, which was simply diluted 
and sweetened alcohol whatever was its flavor, was 
an occasional luxury; while "black strap," or rum 
and molasses, served in mowing time or a "raising." 
One of the greatest changes of the modern decades 
has been in the matter of heating and lighting. We 
depended on wood, which was brought from the 
country in loads upon sledges. This was often not 
kept long enough to burn easily, and the mockery 
of the green wood-fire was one of my recollections, 
the sap oozing from the ends and standing in puddles 
around the hearth. 

I wonder whether the boys who live in Roxbury 
and Dorchester are ever moved to tears or filled 
[ 17 1 



DR. HOLMES'S BOSTON 

with silent awe as they look upon the rocks and frag- 
ments of " puddingstone " abounding in those locaH- 
ties. I have my suspicions that these boys "heave 
a stone" or "fire a brickbat," composed of the con- 
glomerate just mentioned, without any more tear- 
ful or philosophical contemplations than boys of 
less favored regions expend on the same perfor- 
mance. Yet a lump of puddingstone is a thing to 
look at, to think about, to study, to dream over, to 
go crazy with, to beat one's brains out against. 
Look at that pebble in it. From what cliff was it 
broken? On what beach rolled by the waves of the 
ocean? How and when inbedded in soft ooze, which 
itself became stone, and by-and-by was lifted into 
bald summits and steep cliffs, such as you may see 
on Meetinghouse-Hill any day — yes, and mark 
the scratches on their faces left when the boulder- 
carrying glaciers planed the surface of the continent 
with such rough tools that the storms have not 
worn the marks out of it with all the polishing of 
ever so many thousand years? 

Or as you pass a roadside ditch or pool in spring- 
time, take from it a bit of stick or straw which has 
lain undisturbed for a time. Some little worm- 
shaped masses of clear jelly containing specks are 
[ 18] 



CHILDHOOD AND COLLEGE DAYS 

fastened to the stick: eggs of a small snail-like 
shell-fish. One of these specks magnified proves to 
be a crystalline sphere with an opaque mass in the 
centre. And while you are looking, the opaque mass 
begins to stir, and by-and-by slowly to turn upon 
its axis like a forming planet, — life beginning 
in the microcosm, as in the great worlds of the 
firmament, with the revolution that turns the 
surface in ceaseless round to the source of life and 
light. 

A pebble and the spawn of a mollusk ! Before you 
have solved their mysteries, this earth where you 
first saw them may be a vitrified slag, or a vapor 
diffused through planetary spaces. Mysteries are 
common enough, at any rate, whatever the boys in 
Roxbury and Dorchester think of *' brickbats" and 
the spawn of creatures that live in roadside puddles. 

At about ten years of age I began going to what 
we always called the *'Port School," because it was 
kept at Cambridgeport, a mile from the College. 
This suburb was at that time thinly inhabited, 
and, being much of it marshy and imperfectly re- 
claimed, had a dreary look as compared with the 
thriving College settlement. The tenants of the 
many beautiful mansions that have sprung up along 
I 19 1 



DR. HOLMES'S BOSTON 

Main Street, Harvard Street, and Broadway can 
hardly recall the time when, except the "Dana 
House" and the "Opposition House" and the 
" Clark House," these roads were almost all the way 
bordered by pastures until we reached the "stores" 
of Main Street, or were abreast of that forlorn 
"First Row " of Harvard Street. We called the boys 
of that locality "Port-chucks." They called us 
"Cambridge-chucks," but we got along very well 
together in the main. . . . 

Sitting on the girls' benches, conspicuous among 
the school-girls of unlettered origin by that look 
which rarely fails to betray hereditary and congeni- 
tal culture, was a young person very nearly my own 
age. She came with the reputation of being " smart," 
as we should have called it, clever as we say nowa- 
days. This was Margaret Fuller, . . . her air to her 
schoolmates was marked by a certain stateliness 
and distance, as if she had other thoughts than 
theirs and was not of them. ... A remarkable 
point about her was that long, flexile neck, arching 
and undulating in strange, sinuous movements, 
which one who loved her would compare to those of 
a swan, and one who loved her not, to those of the 
ophidian who tempted our common mother. 
[ 20] 



Old Latin School, Bedford Street, 1860 



CHILDHOOD AND COLLEGE DAYS 
My first schoolmaster, William Biglow, was a 
man of peculiar character. He had been master of 
the Boston Latin School for a number of years, and 
seems to have found his pupils an unmanageable set 
in the early part of his reign. I can easily under- 
stand how he found diflSculties in the management 
of a large collection of city boys. ... I do not re- 
member being the subject of any reproof or disci- 
pline at that school, although I do not doubt I de- 
served it, for I was an inveterate whisperer at every 
school I ever attended. I do remember that once as 
he passed me, he tapped me on the forehead with his 
pencil, and said he "could n't help it if I would do 
so well," a compliment I have never forgotten. 

After being five years at Port School, the time 
drew near when I was to enter College. It seemed 
advisable to give me a year of higher training, and 
for that end some pubHc school was thought to offer 
advantages. Phillips Academy at Andover was well 
knowTi to us. . . . It was settled then that I should 
go to PhilHps Academy, and preparations were 
made that I might join the school at the beginning 
of autumn. 

In due time I took my departure in the old car- 
f 21 1 



DR. HOLMES'S BOSTON 
riage, a little modernized from the pattern of my 
Lady Bountiful's. and we jogged soberly along, — 
kind parents and slightly nostalgic boy, — towards 
the seat of learning some twenty miles away. Up 
the old "West Cambridge road, now North Avenue; 
past Davenport's tavern, with its sheltering tree 
and swinging sign: past the old pK)wder -house, look- 
ing like a colossal conical ball set on end; past the 
old Tidd House, one of the finest ante-Revolution- 
ary mansions: past Miss Swan's great square board- 
ing-school, where the music of girhsh laughter was 
ringing through the windy corridors; so on through 
Stoneham . . . Reading . . . Wilmington ... so at 
last into the hallowed borders of the academic 
town. 

My literary performances at Andover, if any 
reader who may have survived so far cares to know, 
included a translation from Virgil, out of which I 
remember this couplet, which had the inevitable 
cockney rhyme of beginners : — 

** Thus by the power of Jove's imperial arm 
The boiling ocean trembled into calm." 

Also a discussion with Master Phineas Barnes 
on the case of Mary, Queen of Scots, which he 
treated argumentatively and I rhetorically and sen- 
[22] 



CHILDHOOD AND COLLEGE DAYS 
timentally. My sentences were praised and his con- 
clusions adopted. 

I went from the Academy to Harvard College. 

We have stately old Colonial palaces in our an- 
cient village, now a city, and a thri^-ing one, — 
square-fronted edifices that stand back from the 
\'ulgar highway, with folded arms, as it were; social 
fortresses of the time when the twihght lustre of 
the throne reached as far as our half -cleared settle- 
ment, with a glacis before them in the shape of a 
long broad gravel- walk, so that in King George's 
time they looked as formidably to any but the silk- 
stocking gentn*, as Gibraltar, or Ehrenbreitstein, 
to a %'isitor without the password. "SVe forget all 
th is in the kindly welcome they give us today: for 
some of them are still standing and doubly famous, 
as we all know. 

The College plain would be nothing without its 
elms. As the long hair of woman is a glory to her, so 
are these green tresses that bank themselves against 
the sk\' in thick clustered masses the ornament and 
the pride of the classic green. You know the ** Wash- 
ington Elm," or if you do not, you had better re- 
[ « ] 



DR. HOLMES'S BOSTON 

kindle your patriotism by reading the inscription, 
which tells you that under its shadow the great 
leader first drew his sword at the head of an Ameri- 
can army. In a line with that you may see two 
others : the coral fan, as I always called it from its 
resemblance in form to that beautiful marine growth, 
and a third a Httle further along. I have heard it 
said that all three were planted at the same time, 
and that the difference in growth is due to the slope 
of the ground, — the Washington elm being lower 
than either of the others. 

The soil of the University town is divided into 
patches of sandy and clayey ground. The Common 
and the College green, near which the old house 
stands, are on one of the sandy patches. Four 
curses are the local inheritance: droughts, dust, 
mud, and canker-worms. I cannot but think that 
all the characters of a region help to modify the 
children born in it. I am fond of making apologies 
for human nature, and I think I could find an ex- 
cuse for myself if I, too, were dry and barren and 
muddy- witted and "cantankerous," — disposed to 
get my back up, like those other natives of the soil. 

Like other boys in the country, I had my patch 
of ground, to which, in the spring time, I intrusted 
[ 24 ] 



CHILDHOOD AND COLLEGE DAYS 

the seeds furnished me, with a confident trust in 
their resurrection and glorification in the better 
world of summer. But I soon found that my lines 
had fallen in a place where a vegetable growth had 
to run the gauntlet of as many foes and trials as a 
Christian pilgrim. 

Beyond the garden was "the field," a vast do- 
main of four acres or thereabout, by the measure- 
ment of after years, bordered to the north by a 
fathomless chasm, — the ditch the base-ball players 
of the present era jump over; on the east by unex- 
plored territory; on the south by a barren enclosure, 
where the red sorrel proclaimed liberty and equality 
»inder its drapeau rouge, and succeeded in estabhsh- 
ing a vegetable commune where all were alike, poor, 
mean, sour, and uninteresting; and on the west by 
the Common, not then disgraced by jealous en- 
closures, which make it look like a cattle-market. 
Beyond, as I looked round, were the Colleges, the 
meeting-house, the little square market-house, long 
vanished; the burial-ground where the dead Presi- 
dents stretched their weary bones under epitaphs 
stretched out at as full length as their subjects; the 
pretty church where the gouty Tories used to kneel 
[25] 



DR. HOLMES'S BOSTON 
on their hassocks; the district school-house, and 
hard by it Ma'am Hancock's cottage, never so called 
in those days, but rather "tenfooter"; then houses 
scattered near and far, open spaces, the shadowy 
elms, round hilltops in the distance and over all the 
great bowl of the sk^-. Mind you, this was the 
WORLD, as I first knew it; terra reierihus cognita, 
as Mr. Arrowsmith would have called it, if he had 
mapped out the universe of my infancy. 

By and by the stony foot of the great University 
will plant itself on this whole territon', and the pri- 
vate recollections which cling so tenaciously and 
fondly to the place and its habitations will have 
died with those who cherished them. 

Shall they ever Hve again in the memorj' of those 
who loved them here below? ^Miat is this life with- 
out the poor accidents which make it our own, and 
by which we identify- ourselves? Ah me I I might 
like to be a winged chorister, but still it seems to me 
I should hardly be quite happy if I could not recall 
at will the Old House with the Long Entn\ and the 
^Tiite Chamber (where I wrote the first verses that 
made me known, with a pencil, stans pede in uno, 
pretty nearly), and the Little Parlor and the Study, 
[ 26] 



CHILDHOOD AXD COLLEGE DAYS 
and the old books in uniforms as varied as those of 
the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company used 
to be, if my memory ser\-es me right, and the front 
yard with the Star-of-Bethlehems growing, flower- 
less, among the grass, and the dear faces to be seen 
no more there or anywhere on this earthly place of 
farewells. 

Go where the ancient pathway guides. 

See where our sires laid dowa 
Their smiling babes, their cherished brides. 

The patriarchs of the towu; 
Hast thou a tear for buried love? 

A sigh for transient po-wer? 
All that a centvLP." left above. 

Go. read it in an hour! 



CHAPTER II 
HABITS AND HABITATIONS 



At, tear her tattered ensign down! 

Long has it waved on high, 
And many an eye has danced to see 

That banner in the sks-; 
Beneath it rung the battle shout. 

And burst the cannon's roar; — 
The meteor of the ocean air 

Shall sweep the clouds no more. 

Her deck, once red with heroes' blood. 

Where knelt the vanquished foe, 
When winds were hurn-ing o'er the flood. 

And waves were white below. 
No more shall feel the victor's tread. 

Or know the conquered knee; — 
The harpies of the shore shall pluck 

The eagle of the sea! 

Oh better that her shattered hulk 

Should sink beneath the wave; 
Her thunders shook the might^^ deep, 

And there should be her grave; 
Nail to the mast her holy flag. 

Set even- threadbare sail, 
And give her to the god of storms, 

The hghtning and the gale I 



CHAPTER II 

HABITS AXD HABITATIONS 

I, THEN, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Junior in Har- 
vard University, am a plumeless biped of the 
height of exactly five feet three inches when stand- 
ing in a pair of substantial boots made by 'Mi. 
Russell of this town, having eyes which I call blue, 
and hair which I do not know what to call, — in 
short, something such a looking kind of animal as I 
was at Andover, with the addition of two or three 
inches to my stature. Secondly with regard to my 
moral quahties, I am rather lazy than otherwise, 
and certainly do not study as hard as I ought to. I 
am not dissipated and I am not sedate, and when 
I last ascertained my college rank I stood in the 
humble situation of seventeenth scholar. ... I am 
acquainted with a great many fellows who do not 
speak to each other. Still I find pleasant compan- 
ions and a few good friends among these jarring 
elements. . . . 

Wednesday — yesterday — was our Exhibition; 
on the whole it was very poor; sometimes fellows 
[31 ] 



DR. HOLMES'S BOSTON 

will get high parts who cannot sustain them with 
credit. Our Exhibition days, however, are very- 
pleasant; in defiance of, or rather evading, the 
injunctions of the government, we contrive to have 
what they call "festive entertainments" and we call 
"blows." A fine body of academic militia, denom- 
inated the "Harvard Washington Corps," parades 
before the ladies in the afternoon, and there is eat- 
ing and drinking and smoking and making merry. 
If you ever come to Boston you will, of course, 
come to Cambridge. Our town has not much to 
boast of, excepting the College; it contains several 
thousand inhabitants, but there are three distinct 
villages. Our professors are several of them perfect 
originals. 

[Two years later Holmes, the medical student, again 
discourses upon his position in another communication 
to his friend Phinehas Barnes.] 

What a busy world we live in! The turmoil of 

those bustling around us, the ebb and flow, the dash 

and recoil, of the unceasing tide within us, — but I 

begin to talk fustian. I suppose now that whenever 

you take the trouble to think about me your fancy 

sketches a twofold picture. In the front ground 

stands myself, on one side sparkle the fountains of 

[32] 



HABITS AND HABITATIONS 

Castalia and on the other stand open the portals of 
Nemesis (if that be the name of Law). My most 
excellent romancer, it is not so! I must announce 
to you the startling position that I have been a 
medical student for more than six months, and I 
am sitting with Wistar's Anatomy beneath my 
quiescent arm, with a stethoscope on my desk, and 
the blood-stained implements of my ungracious 
profession around me. ... I know I might have 
made an indifferent lawyer, — I think I may make 
a tolerable physician, — I did not Uke the one, and 
I do like the other. And so you must know that for 
the last several months I have been quietly occupy- 
ing a room in Boston, attending medical lectures, 
going to the Massachusetts Hospital, and slicing 
and slivering the carcasses of better men and 
women than I ever was myself or am like to be. It 
is a sin for a puny little fellow like me to mutilate 
one of your six-foot men as if he was a sheep, but 
Vive la science! I must write a piece and call it 
records of the dissecting-room, so let me save all 
my pretty things, as plums for my pudding. If you 
would die fagged to death like a crow with the king 
birds after him, — be a school-master; if you would 
wax thin and savage, like a haK-fed spider, — be a 
[33 1 



DR. HOLMES'S BOSTON 

lawyer; if you would go off like an opium-eater in 
love with your starving delusion, — be a doctor. 

To change the subject — I have just now a ruse 
in my head which I am in hopes to put into execu- 
tion this summer. You must be aware, then, that 
there is a young lady, or what sounds sweeter, a 
girl, in Maine — I do not say where. Well, perhaps 
I am in love with her, and perhaps she is in love 
with me. At any rate I made a strapping fellow 
bite his nails, who had the impertinence to think 
she was pretty. I quizzed the caitiff in his remarks, 
anticipated his gallantries, and plagued him till he 
went about his business. Now I have a sneaking 
notion of coming down to Maine to see you, as I 
shall tell the folks, and take a cross-cut over to her 
log house. I can find it. She had so much the air of 
a human being while she was here that I have a 
curiosity to see her wild. Keep quiet. Do not write 
sixteen pages of cross-questions about her name and 
home and such sublunary things. When I am mar- 
ried you shall come and see us, and show her this 
letter. We shall breakfast at eight and dine at two 
precisely. 

[In 1830, when Holmes was in the Law School, the 
frigate Constitution, then lying in the Charlestown 

[34] 



HABITS AND HABITATIONS 

Navy Yard, was condemned by the Navy Department 
to be destroyed. Holmes read this in a newspaper and in 
a mood of indignation hastily penned the lines of "Old 
Ironsides" and sent them to the Boston "Advertiser." 
Fast and far the verses travelled through the press of the 
country, and when they reached Washington, they were 
circulated on printed handbills. The astonished Secre- 
tary made haste to retrace the step which he had taken 
in the interest of business, and the ship obtained its 
reprieve from the young law student, who thus achieved 
fame as a rising poet. 

About the year 1836, one may catch a glimpse of the 
young doctor driving about the city in that chaise 
which, he asserted gayly, brought him more satisfaction 
than did the active practice of medicine: "In one of the 
clumsy great vehicles of that day, swung upon huge 
C springs, vibrating in every direction, the little gentle- 
man used to appear advancing along the road, seeming 
at once in peril and a cause of peril, bouncing insecurely 
upon the seat, and driving always a mettlesome steed 
at an audacious speed." 

On June 15, 1840, the year after he had begun to 
practise medicine. Dr. Holmes married Amelia Lee 
Jackson, of Boston, the third daughter of Hon. Charles 
Jackson, an associate Justice of the Supreme Judicial 
Court of the Commonwealth. Mrs. Holmes was an 
ideal wife, a delightful comrade, and a helpmate calcu- 
lated to supply the wants, and, by her skilful manage- 
ment, smooth the path for her husband. Her executive 
ability enabled her to perform easily many tasks which 
would otherwise have rested upon the Doctor's shouders; 
she shielded him from bores and unnecessary interrup- 
[35] 



DR. HOLMES'S BOSTON 

tions and made his surroundings both cheerful and tran- 
quil. She was kind, gentle, and tactful, and rose with 
strength and nobility to a great emergency such as she 
was forced to face when her eldest son was three times 
wounded in the Civil War. The children of this marriage 
were three. The eldest, Oliver Wendell, has since had 
an illustrious career; entering the Twentieth Massa- 
chusetts among the early volunteers, he was severely 
wounded in three engagements, but each time returned 
to the field. He became a lieutenant-colonel in the 
ser^"ice. Later he studied law, won distinction by his 
writings, and has now been for many years an Associate 
Justice of the United States Supreme Court. The sec- 
ond child, a daughter named after her mother, married 
:Mr. Tudor Sargent. She died in 1889. The third child, 
Edward Jackson, inherited much of his father's wit and 
humor but he also inherited the asthma with which Dr. 
Holmes was all his life afflicted. This undermined the 
son's rather feeble constitution so that he was much 
hampered in his practice of law; he died in 1884, and 
his mother survived him for four years, passing away 
in 1888. 

At the time of his marriage Dr. Holmes bought a 
house at Xo. 8 Montgomer\' Place, subsequently Bos- 
worth Street, which has long since vanished, and of 
which he wrote in 1885 :] 

Yesterday morning I passed through Montgom- 
ery' Place, and found workmen tearing out the in- 
side of Xo. 8, where we lived for eighteen years, and 
where all my children were bom. Not a vestige is 
[36] 



HABITS AND HABITATIONS 

left to show where our old Cambridge house stood. 
. . . We must make ourselves new habitations . . . 
that is all: and earn,' our remembrances, associa- 
tions, affections, all that makes home, under a new 
roof. 

Little I ask; my wants are few; 
I only wish a hut of stone, 

(A very plain brown stone will do,) 
That I may call my own; — 

And close at hand is such a one, 

In yonder street that fronts the sun. 



I care not much for gold or land; — 
Give me a mortgage here and there, — 

Some good bank-stock, some note of hand. 
Or trifling railroad share, — 

I only ask that Fortune send 

A little more than I shall spend. 

[From Montgomery' Place, Dr. Holmes moved to 164 
Charles Street, on the riverside, near the Cambridge 
bridge. This house commanded a fine ^■iewof the estuary 
of the Charles backed by the neighboring hills, and here 
the Doctor spent some happy years until the de5t^o^'ing 
hand of "progress" again approached his dwelling and 
the increasing business traffic on Charles Street forced 
him to migrate to a more tranquil spot, and he followed 
the river — back up Beacon Street — to his final home 
at ^296. It was in 1870 that he took possession of his 
Beacon Street home, in which he breathed his last on 
October 7, 1894. 



DR. HOLMES'S BOSTON 

He was for many years an enthusiastic oarsman, and 
before the building-up of the Back Bay district, when 
there was an extensive estuary on which to embark, he 
was one of the first to launch his boat upon these 
waters. He was to be seen, when the weather permitted, 
making long excursions in his "long, sharp-pointed, 
black-cradle" pattern, and he has entertainingly de- 
scribed this pastime :] 

For the past nine years, I have rowed about, dur- 
ing a good part of the summer, on fresh or salt 
water. My present fleet on the river Charles con- 
sists of three row-boats. 1 — A small flat-bottomed 
skiff of the shape of a flat-iron, kept mainly to lend 
to boys. 2 — A fancy dory for two pairs of sculls, 
in which I sometimes go out with my young folks. 
3 — My own particular water-sulky, a "skeleton" 
or "shell" race-boat, twenty -two feet long, with 
huge outriggers, which boat I pull with ten foot 
sculls, — alone, of course, as it holds but one, and 
tips him out if he does n't mind what he is about. 
In this I glide around the Back Bay, down the 
stream, up the Charles to Cambridge and Water- 
town, up the Mystic, round the wharves, in the 
wake of steamboats, which leave a swell after them 
delightful to rock upon; I linger under the bridges, 
— those "caterpillar bridges," as my brother pro- 
[38 ] 



View from the State House looking West, showing the Back Bay 
before it was filled in 



iv.'.lff v: 



HABITS AND HABITATIONS 

fessor so happily called them; rub against the black 
sides of wood-schooners ; cool down under the over- 
hanging stern of some tall Indiaman; stretch across 
to the Navy Yard, where the sentinel warns me off 
from the Ohio, — just as if I should hurt her by 
lying in her shadow; then strike out into the harbor, 
where the water gets clear and the air smells of the 
ocean, — till all at once I remember, that, if a west 
wind blows up of a sudden, I shall drift along past 
the islands, out of sight of the dear old State House, 
— plate, tumbler, knife and fork all waiting at 
home, but no chair drawn up at the table, — all the 
dear people waiting, waiting, waiting, while the 
boat is sliding, shding, sliding into the great desert, 
were there is no tree and no fountain. As I don't 
want my wreck to be washed up on one of the beaches 
in company with devil's-aprons, bladder-weeds, 
dead horse-shoes, and bleached crab-shells, I turn 
about and flap my long narrow wings for home. 

"\Mien the tide is running out swiftly, I have a 
splendid fight to get through the bridges, but al- 
ways make it a rule to beat, — though I have been 
jammed up into pretty tight places at times, and 
was caught once between a vessel swinging round 
and the pier, until our bones (the boat's, that is) 
[39 ] 



DR. HOLMES'S BOSTON 

cracked as if we had been in the jaws of Behemoth. 
Then back to my moorings at the foot of the Com- 
mon, off with the rowing-dress, dash under the 
green translucent wave, return to the garb of civi- 
hzation, walk through my garden, take a look at the 
elms on the Common, and reaching my habitat, in 
consideration of my advanced period of life, indulge 
in the Elysian abandonment of a huge recumbent 
chair. 

When I have established a pair of well-pro- 
nounced feathering-calluses on my thumbs, when 
I am in training so that I can do my fifteen miles 
at a stretch without coming to grief in any way, 
when I can perform my mile in eight minutes or a 
little more, then I feel as if I had old Time's head 
in chancery, and could give it to him at my leisure. 

I do not deny the attraction of walking. I have 
bored this ancient city through and through in my 
daily travels, until I know it as an old inhabitant of 
Cheshire knows his cheese. Why, it was I who, in 
the course of these rambles, discovered that re- 
markable avenue called Myrtle Street, stretching 
in one long line from east of the Reservoir to a pre- 
cipitous and rudely paved cliff which looks down 
[40] 



HABITS AND HABITATIONS 

on the grim abode of Science, and beyond it to the 
far hills; a promenade so delicious in its repose, so 
cheerfully varied with glimpses down the northern 
slope into busy Cambridge Street with its iron river 
of the horse-railroad, and wheeled barges gliding 
back and forward over it, — so delightfully closing 
at its western extremity in sunny courts and pas- 
sages where I know peace, and beauty, and virtue, 
and serene old age must be perpetual tenants, — so 
alluring to all who desire to take their daily stroll, 
in the words of Dr. Watts — • 

"Alike unknowing and unknown, — " 
that nothing but a sense of duty would have 
prompted me to reveal the secret of its existence. I 
concede, therefore, that walking is an immeasur- 
ably fine invention, of which old age ought con- 
stantly to avail itself. 

I dare not publicly name the rare joys, the infi- 
nite delights, that intoxicate me on some sweet 
June morning, when the river and bay are smooth 
as a sheet of beryl-green silk, and I run along rip- 
ping it up with my knife-edged shell of a boat, the 
rent closing after me like those wounds of angels 
which Milton tells of, but the seam still shining 
\ 41 1 



DR. HOLMES'S BOSTON 
for many a long rood behind me. To lie still over 
the Flats, where the waters are shallow, and see the 
crabs crawling and the sculpins gliding busily and 
silently beneath the boat, — to rustle in through 
the long harsh grass that leads up some tranquil 
creek, — to take shelter from the sunbeams under 
one of the thousand-footed bridges, and look down 
its interminable colonnades, crusted with green and 
oozy growth, studded with minute barnacles, and 
belted with rings of dark mussels, while overhead 
streams and thunders that other river whose every 
wave is a human soul flowing to eternity as the 
river below flows to the ocean, lying there moored 
unseen, in loneliness so profound that the columns 
of Tadmor in the Desert could not seem more re- 
mote from life — the cool breeze on one's forehead, 
the stream whispering against the half-sunken pil- 
lars, — why should I tell of these things, that I 
should live to see my beloved haunts invaded and 
the waves blackened with boats as with a swarm of 
water-beetles? What a city of idiots we must be not 
to have covered this glorious bay with gondolas and 
wherries, as we have just learned to cover the ice in 
winter with skaters! I am satisfied that such a set 
of black-coated, stiff- jointed, soft-muscled, paste- 
[42 1 



Summer Street in 1846, shoicing Trinity Church, with Park Street 
Steeple in the Distance 



HABITS AND HABITATIONS 

complexioned youth as we can boast in our Atlantic 
cities never before sprang from loins of Anglo-Saxon 
lineage. 

West Boston Bridge, which I rake with my opera- 
glass from my window, I have been in the habit 
of crossing since the time when the tall masts of 
schooners and sloops at the Cambridge end of it 
used to frighten me, being a very little child. Year 
after year the boys and men, black and white, may 
be seen fishing over its rails, as hopefully as if the 
river were full of salmon. At certain seasons there 
will be now and then captured a youthful and inex- 
perienced codfish, always, so far as I have observed, 
of quite trivial dimensions. The fame of the exploit 
has no sooner gone abroad, than the enthusiasts of 
the art come flocking down the river and cast their 
lines in side by side, until they look like a row of harp 
strings for number. . . . The spiny sculpin and the 
flabby, muddy flounder are the common rewards of 
the angler's toil. Do you happen to know these fish ? 

[Turning his back upon the river which he loves so 
well, Dr. Holmes climbs the hill and points out the 
early abiding places of several famous Bostonians.j 

Emerson's birthplace and that of our other illus- 
[43] 



DR. HOLMES'S BOSTON 

trious Bostonian, Benjamin Franklin, were within 
a kite-string's distance of each other. When the 
baby philosopher of the last century was carried 
from Milk Street through the narrow passage long 
known as Bishop's Alley, now Hawley Street, he 
came out in Summer Street, very nearly opposite 
the spot where, at the beginning of this century, 
stood the parsonage of the First Church, the home 
of the Reverend William Emerson, its pastor, and 
the birthplace of his son Ralph Waldo. The oblong 
quadrangle between Newbury, now Washington 
Street, Pond, now Bedford Street, Summer Street, 
and the open space called Church Green, where the 
New South Church was afterwards erected, is rep- 
resented on Bonner's maps of 1772 and 1769 as an 
almost blank area, not crossed or penetrated by a 
single passageway. 

Even so late as less than a half century ago this 
region was still a most attractive little rus in urhe. 
The sunny gardens of the late Judge Charles Jack- 
son and the late Mr. S. P. Gardner opened their 
flowers and ripened their fruits in the places now 
occupied by great warehouses and other massive 
edifices. The most aristocratic pears, the "Saint 
Michael," the "Brown Bury," found their natural 
[44 ] 



Beacon Street in Dr. Holmes's Time 



HABITS AND HABITATIONS 

homes in these sheltered enclosures. The fine old 
mansion of Judge William Prescott looked out upon 
these gardens. Some of us can well remember the 
window of his son's, the historian's, study, the light 
from which used every evening to glimmer through 
the leaves of the pear-trees while the "Conquest of 
Mexico" was achieving itself under difficulties 
hardly less formidable than those encountered by 
Cortes. It was a charmed region in which Emerson 
first drew his breath. 

Motley's father's family was at this time living in 
the house No. 7 Walnut Street, looking down Chest- 
nut Street over the water to the western hills. Near 
by, at the corner of Beacon Street, was the residence 
of the family of the first mayor of Boston, and at 
a little distance from the opposite corner was the 
house of one of the fathers of New England manu- 
facturing enterprise, a man of superior intellect, 
who built up a great name and fortune in our city. 
The children from these three homes naturally be- 
came playmates. Mr. Motley's house was a very 
hospitable one, and Lothrop and two of his young 
companions were allowed to carry out their schemes 
of amusement in the garden and the garret. If one 
with a prescient glance could have looked into that 
[45 1 



DR. HOLMES'S BOSTON 

garret on some Saturday afternoon while our cen- 
tury was not far advanced in its second score of 
years, he might have found three boys in cloaks and 
doublets and plumed hats, heroes and bandits, en- 
acting more or less impromptu melodramas. In one 
of the boys he would have seen the embryo drama- 
tist of a nation's life history, John Lothrop Motley; 
in the second, a famous talker and wit who has 
spilled more good things on the wasteful air in con- 
versation than would carry a *' diner-out" through 
half a dozen London seasons . . . Thomas Gold 
Appleton. In the third, he would have recognized 
a champion of liberty known wherever that word is 
spoken, an orator whom to hear is to revive all the 
traditions of the grace, the address, the command- 
ing sway of the silver-tongued eloquence of the most 
renowned speakers, — Wendell Phillips. 



CHAPTER III 
BOSTON IN WAR TIMES 



We sing "Our Country's " song to-night 

With saddened voice and eye; 
Her banner droops in clouded light 

Beneath the wintry sky. 
We'll pledge her once in golden wine 

Before her stars have set: 
Though dim one reddening orb may shine, 

We have a Country yet. 



CHAPTER III 

BOSTON IN WAR TIMES 

["War Times" found Dr. Holmes an intense Union- 
ist and patriot; he could not be induced to join working 
organizations, but he pUed his pen ardently for his 
country's cause; he produced vivid prose, and stirring 
war lyrics; and his eldest son was among the first to 
enlist. 

In 1861 he wrote Motley of conditions then prevail- 
ing in Boston :] 

I AM thankful for your sake that you are out of 
this wretched country. There was never anything 
in our experience that gave any idea of it before. 
Not that we have any material suffering as yet. 
Our factories have been at work, and our dividends 
have been paid. Society — in Boston, at least — has 
been nearly as gay as usual. I had a few thousand 
dollars to raise to pay for my house in Charles 
Street, and sold my stocks for more than they 
cost me. We have had predictions, to be sure, 
that New England was to be left out in the cold 
if a new confederacy was formed, and that the grass 
was to grow in the streets of Boston. But prophets 
[49] 



DR. HOLMES'S BOSTON 

are at a terrible discount in these times, and in 
spite of their predictions Merrimac sells at $125. 
It is the terrible uncertainty of everything — most 
of all, the uncertainty of the opinion of men, I had 
almost said of principles. From the impracticable 
Abolitionist, as bent on total separation from the 
South as Carolina is on secession from the North, 
to a Hunker, or Submissionist, or whatever you 
choose to call the wretch who would sacrifice every- 
thing and beg the South's pardon for offending it, 
you find all shades of opinion in our streets. 

[In reply to some criticisms concerning his failure to 
play the part of a literary reformer he exclaims :] 

You blame me (kindly always) for what I do not 
do. I do not write poems or introduce passages 
stigmatizing war and slavery . . . one set of critics 
proscribe me for being serious and another for being 
gay, you will take neither the one hand nor the other 
with good grace, because I am not philo-melanic or 
miso-polemic enough to meet your standard. 

I supposed that you, and such as you, would feel 
that I had taught a lesson of love, and would thank 
me for it. I supposed that you would say that I had 
tried in my humble way to adorn some of this com- 
mon life that surrounds us, with colors borrowed 
[50] 



^^'^, 



Colonnade Row, Tremont Street, opposite the Common, in 1860 



O'ciVA «j ,«o.wnvoO "ss^J siVv.«^qo ,te?»ti?A Saromatt ,ftfo5^ *V»o.wkoJoO 



BOSTON IX WAR TIMES 
from the imagination and the feelings, and thank 
me for my effort. I supposed you would recognize a 
glow of kindly feeling in even' word of my poor 
lesson — even in its light touches of satire, which 
were only aimed at the excesses of well-meaning 
people. 

I am sorn' that I have failed in giving you pleas- 
ure because I have omitted two subjects on which 
you would have loved to hear my testimony. . . . 
But I must say, with regard to art and the manage- 
ment of my own powers, I think I shall in the main 
follow my own judgment and taste, rather than 
mould myself upon those of others. I shall follow 
the bent of my natural thoughts, which grow more 
grave and tender, or will do so as years creep over 
me. I shall not be afraid of gaiety more than of 
old, but I shall have more courage to he serious. 
Above all, I shall always be pleased rather to show 
what is beautiful in the life around me than to be 
pitching into giant vices, against which the acrid 
pulpit and the corrosive newspaper will always an- 
ticipate the gentle poet. Each of us has his theory 
of life, of art, of his own existence and relations. It 
is too much to ask of you to enter fully into mine, 
[ 51 ] 



DR. HOLMES'S BOSTON 
but be ver\' well assured that it exists, — that it has 
its axioms, its intuitions, its connected behefs as 
well as your own. Let me tr^* to improve and please 
my fellow-men after my own fashion at present. 

I go very Httle to Society and Club meetings. 
Some feel more of a call that way, others less; I 
among the least. 

I hate the calling of meetings to order. I hate the 
nomination of "officers," always fearing lest I 
should be appointed Secretary. I hate being placed 
on committees. They are always having meetings 
at which half are absent and the rest late. I hate 
being officially and necessarily in the presence of 
men most of whom, either from excessive zeal in the 
good cause or from constitutional obtuseness, are 
incapable of being bored, which state is to me the 
most exhausting of all conditions, absorbing more 
of my life than any kind of active exertion I am 
capable of performing. 

I am slow in apprehending parliamentary^ rules 
and usages, averse to the business details many per- 
sons revel in; and I am not in love with most of the 
actively stirring people whom one is apt to meet in 
all associations for doing good. 
[52] 



BOSTON IX WAR TIMES 

Some trees grow verv' tall and straight and large 
in the forest close to each other, but some must 
stand by themselves or they won't grow at all. Ever 
since I used to go to the "Institute of 1770" and 
hear Bob Rantoul call members to order, and to the 
"Euphradian" where our poor Loring used to be 
eloquent about Effie Deans, I have recognized an 
inaptitude, not to say ineptitude, belonging to me 
in connection with all such proceedings. 

February 8, 1861, is said to have been the coldest 
day in this region for thirty-seven years. The ther- 
mometer fell to from 1^2" to 20° below zero in Boston, 
and from 20° to 30° in the neighboring towns. You 
may know it is cold when you see people clapping 
their hands to their ears, and hoisting their shoul- 
ders and running. I see them on the long West 
Boston Bridge every winter from my warm home at 
the river's edge in Boston. I am afraid with the 
wicked pleasure that Lucretius speaks of. 

I know rather less of finance than you do of 
medicine. ... I have always thought that if I had 
passed a year or two in a counting-room it would 
have sone far towards making a sensible man of me. 



DR. HOLMES'S BOSTON 
I only know there is a great split about making 
government paper legal tender, and if I could see 
Bill Gray five minutes just at this point, I could 
make out where the pinch is, and what heft him 
awake a week ago as I hear something did, thinking 
about it. 

For myself, I do not profess to have any political 
wisdom. I read, I listen, I judge to the best of my 
ability. ... If we have grown unmanly and degen- 
erate in the north wind, I am willing that the sirocco 
should sweep us off from the soil. If the course of 
nature must be reversed for us, and the Southern 
Goths must march to the *' beggarly land of ice" to 
overrun and recolonize us, I have nothing to object. 
But I have a most solid and robust faith in the 
sterling manhood of the North, in its endurance, 
its capacity for a military training, its plasticity for 
every need, in education, in political equality, in 
respect for man as man in peaceful development, 
which is our law, in distinction from aggressive col- 
onization; in human qualities as against " bestial and 
diabolical ones" in the Lord as against the Devil. 

If I never see peace and freedom in this land, I 
shall have faith that my children will see it. If they 
[54 ] 



Daniel Webster's House, at the corner of High and Summer Streets 



BOSTON IN WAR TIMES 

do not live long enough to see it I believe their chil- 
dren will. The revelations we have had from the 
Old World have shed a new light for us on feudal 
barbarism. We know now where we have to look for 
sympathy. But oh! it would have done your heart 
good to see the processions of day before yesterday 
and to-day, the air all aflame with flags, the streets 
shaking with the tramp of long-stretched lines, and 
only one feeling showing itself, the passion of the 
first great uprising, only the full flower of which 
that was the opening bud. 

God bless the Flag and its loyal defenders. 
While its broad folds o'er the battle-field wave, 
Till the dim star-wreath rekindle its splendors. 
Washed from its stains in the blood of the brave! 

They were talking in the cars to-day of Fremont's 

speech at the Tremont Temple last evening. His 

allusions to slavery — you know what they must 

have been — were received with an applause which 

they would never have gained a little while ago. 

Nay, I think a miscellaneous Boston audience 

would be more like to cheer any denunciation of 

slavery now than almost any other sentiment. 

Do not think that the pluck or determination of 
the North has begun to yield. There never was such 
[ 55 1 



DR. HOLMES'S BOSTON 

a universal enthusiasm for the defence of the Union 
and the trampKng out of rebelHon as at this perilous 
hour. ... I won't say to you "be of good courage," 
because men of ideas are not put down by the acci- 
dents of a day or a year. 

You remain an idealist, as all generous natures do 
and must. I sometimes think it is the only absolute 
line of division between men, — that which separates 
the men who hug the actual from those who stretch 
their arms to embrace the possible. I reduce my 
points of contact with the first class to a minimum. 

You know better than I do the contrivances of 
that detested horde of mercenary partisans who 
would in a moment accept Jeff Davis, the slave- 
trade, and a Southern garrison in Boston, to get 
back their post-offices and their custom-houses. . . . 
The mean sympathizers with the traitors are about 
in the streets under many aspects. You can gener- 
ally tell the more doubtful ones by the circumstance 
that they have a great budget of complaints against 
the government, that their memory is exceedingly 
retentive of every reverse and misfortune, and that 
they have the small end of their opera-glasses to- 
[5Q] 



BOSTON IN WAR TIMES 

wards everything that looks encouraging. I do not 
think strange of this in old men; they wear their old 
opinions like their old clothes, until they are thread- 
bare, and we need them as standards of past thought 
which we may reckon our progress by, as the ship 
wants her stationary log to tell her headway. But 
to meet young men who have breathed this Ameri- 
can air without taking the contagious fever of lib- 
erty, whose hands lie as cold and flabby in yours as 
the fins of a fish, on the morning of a victory — this 
is the hardest thing to bear. 

Oh, if the bullets would only go to the hearts that 
have no warm human blood in them ! But the most 
generous of our youth is the price we must pay for 
the new heaven, and the new earth which are to be 
born of this fiery upheaval. I think one of the most 
trying things of a struggle like this is the painful 
revelation of the meanness which lies about us un- 
suspected. 

War is a very old story, but it is a new one to this 
generation of Americans. Our own nearest relation 
in the ascending line remembers the Revolution 
well. How should she forget it? Did she not lose her 
doll, which was left behind when she was carried out 
of Boston, about that time growing uncomfortable 
[57] 



DR. HOLMES'S BOSTON 

by reason of cannon-balls dropping in from the 
neighboring heights at all hours, — in token of 
which see the tower of Brattle Street Church at this 
very day? War in her memory means '76. As for 
the brush of 1812, "we did not think much about 
that " ; and everybody knows that the Mexican busi- 
ness did not concern us much, except in its politi- 
cal relations. No! war is a new thing to us who are 
not in the last quarter of their century. 

The war passion burned like scattered coals of 

fire in the households of Revolutionary times; now 

it rushes all through the land like a flame over the 

prairie. 

" As the wild tempest wakes the slumbering sea. 
Thou only teachest all that man can be ! " 

We indulged in the above apostrophe to War in a 
Phi Beta Kappa poem of long ago. . . . Oftentimes, 
in paroxysms of peace and good will towards all 
mankind, we have felt twinges of conscience about 
the passage, especially when one of our orators 
showed us that a ship of war costs as much to build 
and to keep as a college, and that every port-hole 
we could stop would give us a new professor. Now 
we begin to think there was some meaning in our 
[58] 



BOSTON IN WAR TIMES 

poor couplet. War has taught us, as nothing else 
could, what we can be and are. It has exalted our 
manhood and womanhood, and driven us all back 
upon our substantial human qualities, for a long 
time more or less kept out of sight by the spirit of 
commerce, the love of art, science, or literature, or 
other qualities not belonging to all of us as men and 
women. 

Whatever miseries this war brings upon us, it is 
making us wiser, and w^e trust better. Wiser, for 
we are learning our weakness, our narrowness, our 
selfishness, our ignorance, in lessons of sorrow and 
shame. Better, because all that is noble in men and 
women is demanded by the time, and our people 
are rising to the standard the time calls for. For 
this is the question the hour is putting to each of us. 
Are you ready, if need be, to sacrifice all that you 
have and hope for in this world, that the generations 
to follow you may inherit a whole country whose 
natural condition shall be peace, and not a broken 
province which must five under the perpetual 
threat, if not in the constant presence, of war and 
all that war brings with it.? If we are ready for this 
sacrifice, battles may be lost, but the campaign and 
its grand object must be won. 
[59 1 



DR. HOLMES'S BOSTON 

[After the battle of Antietain Dr. Holmes received 
a mess;v?t^ tliat his son Captiiiu Holmes Wi\s seriously 
womidevl.] 

In the dead of night which closed upon the bloody 
field of Antietam my household was startled from 
its slumbers by the loud summons of a telegraphic 
messenger. The air had been hea^y all day with 
the rumors of battle, and thousands and tens of 
thousands had walked the streets with throbbing 
hearts, in dread anticii>ation of the tidings any hour 
might bring. 

We rose hastily, and presently the messenger was 
admitted. I took the envelope from his hand, 
opened it, and read: — 

HiGEBSTOWN", 17th. 

Capt. H. wounded shot through the neck thought 
not mortal at Keedysville. 

[Dr. Holmes immediately set out upon a journey 
southward, and spent many days in vainly searching 
the ho5pitals and temporary shelters for his wounded 
son. In an article entitled **My Hunt after "The Cap- 
tain,'" he has set forth his quest in a memorable de- 
scription of the conditions prevailing after the terrible 
battle.] 

Was it possible that my Captain could be lying on 
straw in one of these places? Certainly it was pos- 

[60] 



West Street in 1860, looking totcanb Bedford Street 



^a-i-rt?. hVir 



BOSTON IX WAR TIMES 
sible, but not probable; but as the lantern was held 
over each bed, it was with a kind of thrill that I 
looked upon the features it illuminated. Many 
times I started as some faint resemblance, — the 
shade of a young man's hair, the outline of his half- 
turned face, — recalled the presence I was in search 
of. The face would turn towards me, and the mo- 
mentary- illusion would pass away, but still the 
fancy clung to me. There was no figure huddled up 
on its rude couch, none stretched at the roadside, 
none toiling languidly along the dusty pike, none 
passing in car or in ambulance, that I did not scru- 
tinize as if it might be that for which I was making 
my pilgrimage to the battle-field. 

[Dr. Holmes missed the young Captain, who was travel- 
ling homeward by slow stages, and their meeting at last 
upK)n the train is characteristically described by him.] 

The expected train came in so quietly that I was 
almost startled to see it on the track. Let us walk 
calmly through the cars, and look around us. 

In the first car, on the fourth seat to the right, I 
saw my Captain; there I saw him, even my first- 
bom, whom I had sought through many cities. 

*'How are you Boy.'"' 

**'How are you. Dad.'" 

[61 ] 



DR. HOLMES'S BOSTON 
Such are the proprieties of hfe, as they are ob- 
served among us Anglo-Saxons of the nineteenth 
century, decently disguising those natural impulses 
that made Joseph, the Prime Minister of Egypt, 
weep aloud so that the Egyptians and the house of 
Pharaoh heard, — nay, which had once overcome 
his shaggy old uncle Esau so entirely that he fell on 
his brother's neck and cried like a baby in the pres- 
ence of all the women. 

On Monday morning, the twenty-ninth of Sep- 
tember, we took the cars for home. . . . 

Fling open the window-blinds of the chamber 
that looks out on the waters and towards the western 
sun ! Let the joyous light shine in upon the pictures 
that hang upon its walls, and the shelves thick-set 
with the names of poets and philosophers and sacred 
teachers, in whose pages our boys learn that life is 
noble only when it is held cheap by the side of honor 
and of duty. Lay him on his bed, and let him sleep 
off his aches and weariness. So comes down another 
night over this household, unbroken by any mes- 
senger of evil tidings, — a night of peaceful rest and 
grateful thoughts; for this our son and brother was 
dead and is alive again, and was lost and is found. 



BOSTON IN WAR TIMES 

Lord of all being ! throned afar, 
Thy glory flames from sun and star; 
Centre and soul of every sphere, 
Yet to each loving heart how near ! 

Our midnight is thy smile withdrawn; 
Our noontide is thy gracious dawn; 
Our rainbow arch thy mercy's sign; 
All, save the clouds of sin, are thine! 

[On the 4th of July, 1863, Dr. Holmes delivered a 
stirring Oration before the Authorities of Boston. He 
closed this splendid address with the words:] 

Citizens of Boston, sons and daughters of New 
England, men and women of the North, brothers 
and sisters in the bond of American Union, you 
have among you the scarred and wasted soldiers 
who have shed their blood for your temporal salva- 
tion. They bore your nation's emblems bravely 
through the fire and smoke of the battle-field; nay, 
their own bodies are starred with bullet- wounds and 
striped with sabre-cuts, as if to mark them as be- 
longing to their country until their dust becomes a 
portion of the soil which they defended. In every 
Northern graveyard slumber the victims of this 
destroying struggle. Many whom you remember 
playing as children amidst the clover-blossoms of 
[ 63 1 



DR. HOLMES'S BOSTON 

our Northern fields, sleep under nameless mounds 
with strange Southern wild-flowers blooming over 
them. By those wounds of living heroes, by those 
graves of fallen martyrs, by the hopes of your chil- 
dren yet unborn, and the claims of your children's 
children yet unborn, in the name of outraged honor, 
in the interest of violated sovereignty, for the life of 
an imperilled nation, for the sake of men every- 
where and of our common humanity, for the glory 
of God and the advancement of his kingdom on 
earth, your country calls upon you to stand by her 
through good report and through evil report, in 
triumph and in defeat, until she emerges from the 
great war of Western civilization. Queen of the 
broad continent, Arbitress in the councils of earth's 
emancipated peoples; until the flag that fell from 
the wall of Fort Sumter floats again inviolate, su- 
preme, over all her ancient inheritance, every for- 
tress, every capital, every ship, and this warring 
land is once more a United Nation! 

Flag of the heroes who left us their glory. 

Borne through their battle-fields' thunder and flame, 
Blazoned in song and illumined in story, 
Wave o'er us all who inherit their fame ! 
Up with our banner bright, 
Sprinkled with starry light, 

[ 64 ] 



BOSTON IN WAR TIMES 

Spread its fair emblems from mountain to shore, 

While through the sounding sky 

Loud rings the Nation's cry, — 
Union and Liberty! One Evekmore! 



CHAPTER IV 

THE COLISEUM AND THE BOSTON FIRE 

1869-1872 



(Simg at ike " JvbiUe,'' June 15, 1869, to the music of Keller's "American 
Hymn.") 

AxGEL of Peace, tiiou hast wandered too long! 

Spread thy white wings to the sunshine of love ! 
Come while our voices are blended in song, — 

Fly to our ark like the storm-beaten dove ! — 
Fly to our ark on the wings of the dove, — 

Speed o'er the far-sounding billows of song, 
Crowned with thine oHve-leaf garland of love, — 

Angel of Peace, thou hast waited too long! 



CHAPTER IV 

THE COLISEUM AND THE BOSTON' FIRE 



-1875 

[The great "Peace JubUee" of 1869 was an epoch- 
making occurrence in Boston. It was pronounced bv 
Dr. Holmes: "a mighty success"; "a sensation of a 
Ufetime"; he wrote of it to Motley in glowing terms.] 

We have had the Cohseimi fever, and happily re- 
covered. It was a grand affair, I assure you. I 
doubt if forty thousarid people were ever seen be- 
fore under one unbroken continuity of roof, in a 
single honest parallelogram. I wiU give you its 
dimensions, as compared with the CoHseum at 
Rome, — which last building had velana. very 
probably, for emperors, ambassadors, and such, but 
had no proper roof. The audience was truly a won- 
derful sight, and the vast orchestra and chorus, 
though not deafening, as many expected, was al- 
most oceanic in the volume of its surges and billows. 
I wrote a hynm for it which Amory told me, two 
days ago, I had not been praised enough for. 

[At this same period he describes the new statue of 
Washington which he suggests needs to be turned about 
in order to face the city of Boston.] 

[69] 



DR. HOLMES'S BOSTON 
We have got a grand mew equestrian statue of 
George Washington, "first in war," etc., in the 
Pubhc Garden. It reminds me of Rauch's statue of 
Frederic at BerHn, which I never saw, except in a 
glass stereograph — almost as good, however, as 
the statue itself. It faces down Commonwealth 
Avenue, as if he were riding out of Boston. I won- 
der we have not had an epigram, in some New York 
paper, to the effect that he is turning his horse's 
tail to us. They can turn it about, however, as they 
have done with Everett's. I suppose you [John 
Lothrop Motley] will be in bronze one of these days, 
— but I hope they will make you face Boston. This 
new and first equestrian statue we have seen here is 
generally admired. I think it is admirable in its 
effect, and I have not heard any but favorable 
criticisms so far. So you see, what with her Coli- 
seum, and its thousand instruments and ten thou- 
sand singers, and its "man on horseback" (what a 
wonderfully picturesque generalization that was of 
Caleb Cushing's), and its two members of the Cabi- 
net and Minister to England, our Httle town of 
Boston feels as good as any place of its size, to say 
nothing of bigger ones. 

[When the friends of the rival claimants of the dis- 
[70] 



The Coliseum of the Peace Jubilee of 1869 



THE COLISEUM 

covery of anaesthesia were proposing monuments for 
each, Holmes suggested that all should unite in erecting 
a single memorial, with a central group symbolizing 
painless surgery, a statue of Jackson on one side, a 
statue of Morton on the other and the inscription be- 
neath: "To E (i)ther."] 

I am going to send you my Halleck poem . . . and 

one or two other trifles. They will have a home 

flavor, I know, and you will get a whiff of Boston 

and Cambridge associations out of them, if nothing 

else, — just as Mr. Ho wells told me, coming out in 

the cars, yesterday, that the smell of the Back Bay 

salt water brought back Venice to him. 

[The Humboldt Centennial celebration, which took 
place on September 14, 1869, of which Holmes wrote, 
was a feature of importance in Boston.] 

September, 1868. 
This last week we had a Humboldt celebration, 
or rather two, in Boston. One in which Agassiz 
was the orator, the other in which a German — 
Heinzel by name — was speaker. Agassiz did him- 
self credit by a succinct account of Humboldt's life 
and labors, and interesting anecdotes of his per- 
sonal relations with him. He was in great trouble all 
the time. Curious hint for public speakers who use 
glasses. I sat next to Charles Sumner. "Agassiz 
[71] 



DR. HOLMES'S BOSTON 

has made a mistake," he said; *'he has eye-glasses; 
he ought to have spectacles. In three or four min- 
utes his skin will get moist and they will sUp and 
plague him." They did not in "three or four min- 
utes," but in the last part of his address they gave 
him a good deal of trouble keeping one hand busy 
all the time to replace them as they slid down his 
nose. Remember this if you have occasion to speak 
an hour or two before an audience in a warm room. 
Of course I wrote a poem, which I had the wonder- 
ful sense to positively refuse delivering in Music 
Hall after the long Address of Agassiz, but read at 
the soiree afterwards. I thought well of it, as I am 
apt to, and others liked it. 

His was no taper lit in cloistered cage, 

Its glimmer borrowed from the grove or porch; 

He read the record of the planet's page 
By Etna's glare and Cotopaxi's torch. 

He heard the voices of the pathless woods; 

On the salt steppes he saw the starlight shine; 
He scaled the mountain's windy solitudes, 

And trod the galleries of the breathless mine. 

For God's new truth he claimed the kingly robe 
That priestly shoulders counted all their own, 

Unrolled the gospel of the storied globe 
And led young Science to her empty throne. 

f 72 1 



THE COLISEUM 

Longfellow has got home, not looking younger 
certainly, but luminous with gentle graces as always. 
. . . Walking on the bridge two or three weeks ago, 

I met a barouche with Miss G and a portly 

mediaeval gentleman at her side. I thought it was a 
ghost, almost, when the barouche stopped and out 
jumped Tom Appleton in the flesh, and plenty of 
it, as aforetime . We embraced — or rather he em- 
braced me and I partially spanned his goodly cir- 
cumference. He has been twice here — the last 
time he took tea and stayed till near eleven, pouring 
out all the time such a torrent of talk, witty, enter- 
taining, audacious, ingenious, sometimes extrava- 
gant, but fringed always with pleasing fancies as 
deep as the border of a Queen's cashmere, that my 
mind came out of it as my body would out of a 
Turkish bath — every joint snapped and its hard 
epidermis taken clean off in that four hours' immer- 
sion. 

So you see I have only told you of small local and 
personal matters, not so well as a lively woman 
would have done, but as they came up to my mind. 
I read somewhere lately a letter of a great personage 
then abroad — I think it was old John Adams — in 
which he begs for a letter full of trifling home-mat- 
[73] 



DR. HOLMES'S BOSTON 

ters. He gets enough that strains him to read, and 
he wants undress talk. I can tell you nothing of the 
large world you will not get better from other cor- 
respondents, but I can talk to you of places and 
persons and topics of limited interest which will 
perhaps give you five minutes of Boston, and be as 
refreshing as a yawn and stretch after being fixed 
an hour in one position. 

April, 1870. 
I have been well enough of late, and went to a 

dinner-party at Mrs. 's yesterday, and a kind 

of soiree she had after it. This good lady (who is a 
distant relation of Mrs. Leo Hunter) had bagged 
Mr. Fechter, who has been turning the heads of the 
Boston women and girls with his Hamlets and 
Claude Melnottes. A pleasant, intelligent man, — 
but Boston furores are funny. The place is just of 
the right size for aesthetic endemics, and they spare 
neither age nor sex — among the women, that is, 
for we have man-women and woman-women here, 
you know. It reminds me of the time we had when 
Jefferson was here, but Fechter is feted off the stage 
as much as he is applauded on it. I have only seen 
him in Hamlet, in which he interested rather than 
[74] 



THE COLISEUM 

overwhelmed me. But his talk about Rachel and 
the rest with whom he has played so much was 
mighty pleasant. 

December, 1871. 
At this moment, as I write, a flock of a hundred 
or more wild ducks are swimming about and diving 
in a little pool in the midst of the ice, for the river 
has just frozen over again, and the thermometer 
was at zero yesterday. I think you would call my 
library a pleasant room, even after all the fine resi- 
dences you have seen. I do not think the two famous 
Claudes of Longford Castle, with the best picture 
Turner ever painted between them, would pay me 
for my three windows which look over the estuary 
of Charles River. But you know I have the faculty 
of being pleased with everything that is mine. 

Through my north window, in the wintry weather, — 

My airy oriel on the river shore, — 
I watch the sea-fowl as they flock together 

Where late the boatman flashed his dripping oar. 

I see the solemn gulls in council sitting 

On some broad ice-floe pondering long and late, 

While overhead the home-bound ducks are flitting, 
And leave the tardy concave in debate. 

[75] 



DR. HOLMES'S BOSTON 

How often gazing where a bird reposes, 

Rocked on the wavelets, dripping with the tide, 

I lose myseK in strange metempsychosis 
And float a sea-fowl at a sea-fowl's side. 

A voice recalls me. — From my window turning 

I find myself a plumeless biped still; 
No beak, no claws, so sign of wings discerning, 

In fact with nothing bird-Hke but my quill. 

[At this time, 1870, the accession of Harvard' s new 
president was a matter of much interest.] 

Our new President Eliot has turned the whole 
University over like a flapjack. There never was such 
a bouleversement as that in our Medical Faculty. 
The Corporation has taken the whole management 
out of our hands and changed everything. We are 
paid salaries, which I rather like, though I doubt if 
we gain in pocket by it. We have, partly in conse- 
quence of outside pressure, remodelled our whole 
course of instruction. Consequently we have a 
smaller class, but better students, each of whom 
pays more than under the old plan of manage- 
ment. 

It is so curious to see a young man like Eliot, 
with an organizing brain, a firm will, a grave, calm, 
dignified presence, taking the ribbons of our classi- 
[76] 



THE COLISEUM 

cal coach and six, feeling the horses' mouths, put- 
ting a check on this one's capers and touching that 
one with the lash, — turning up everywhere, in 
every Faculty (I belong to three), on every public 
occasion at every dinner orne, and taking it all as 
naturally as if he had been born President. In the 
mean time Yale has chosen a Connecticut country 
minister, cet. 60, as her President, and the experi- 
ment of Kberal culture with youth at the helm ver- 
sus orthodox repression with a graybeard Palinurus 
is going on in a way that it is impossible to look at 
without interest in seeing how the experiment will 
turn out. 

I suppose E has told you all about the 

Grand Duke's visit and the stir it made in our little 
city. You are so used to great folks that a Grand 
Duke is not more to you than a Giant or a Dwarf 
is to Barnum; but we had not had a sensation for 
some time, and this splendid young man — for he is 
a superb specimen — produced great effect. I sup- 
pose you get the Boston papers sometimes and read 
what your fellow-citizens are doing. The dinner the 
gentlemen (gave) was a handsome one — thirty-five 
dollars a plate ought to pay for what the Californ- 
ians call a "square meal." Speeches and a poem, of 
[77 1 



DR. HOLMES'S BOSTON 

course — blush for me ! — the whole affair was a 
success, with one or two fiascos. 

[Holmes wrote to his friend Motley a graphic de- 
scription of the great Boston fire of 1872.] 

The recollection of the Great Fire will always be 

associated with a kindly thought of yourself in my 

memory. For on Saturday, the 9th of November, 

your sister Mrs. S. Rodman, sent me a package of 

little Dutch story-books, which you had been so 

good as to procure for me. You have no idea with 

what childlike, or if you will childish, interest I 

looked at those little 'story-books. I was sitting in 

my library, my wife opposite, somewhere near nine 

o'clock, perhaps, when I heard the fire-bells and left 

the Dutch picture-books, which I was very busy 

with (trying to make out the stories with the aid of 

the pictures, which was often quite easy), and went 

to the north window. Nothing there. We see a good 

many fires in the northern hemisphere, which our 

windows command, and always look, when we hear 

an alarm, towards Charlestown, East Cambridge, 

Cambridge, and the towns beyond. Seeing nothing 

in that direction I went to the windows on Beacon 

Street, and looking out saw a column of light which 

I thought might come from the neighborhood of the 

[78] 



THE BOSTON FIRE 

corner of Boylston and Tremont Streets, where 
stands one of the finest edifices in Boston, the 
"Hotel Boylston," put up by Charles Francis 
Adams. The fire looked so formidable, I went out, 
thinking I would go to Commonwealth Avenue to 
get a clear view of it. As I went in that direction I 
soon found I was approaching a great conflagration. 
There was no getting very near the fire; but that 
night and the next morning I saw it dissolving the 
great high buildings, which seemed to melt away in 
it. My son Wendell made a remark which I found 
quite true, that great walls would tumble and yet 
one would hear no crash, — they came down as if 
they had fallen on a vast feather-bed. Perhaps, as 
he thought, the air was too full of noises for us to 
note what would have been in itself a startling crash. 
I hovered round the Safety Vaults in State Street, 
where I had a good deal of destructible property of 
my own and others, but no one was allowed to en- 
ter them. So I saw (on Sunday morning) the fire 
eating its way straight toward my deposits, and 
millions of others with them, and thought how I 
should like it to have them wiped out with that red 
flame that was coming along clearing everything 
before it. But I knew all was doing that could be 
[79] 



DR. HOLMES'S BOSTON 
done, and so I took it quietly enough, and managed 
to sleep both Saturday and Sunday nights tolerably 
well, though I got up every now and then to see how 
far and fast the flames were spreading northward. 
Before Sunday night, however, they were tolerably 
well in hand, so far as I could learn, and on Monday 
all the world within reach was looking at the wilder- 
ness of ruins. 

To-day, Saturday, I went with my wife to the 
upper story of Hovey's store on Summer Street, a 
great establishment, — George Gardner, you re- 
member, owns the building, — which was almost 
miraculously saved. The scene from the upper win- 
dows was wonderful to behold. Right opposite, 
Trinity Church, its tower standing, its walls partly 
fallen, more imposing as a ruin than it ever was in 
its best estate, — everything flat to the water, so 
that we saw the ships in the harbor as we should 
have done from the same spot in the days of Black- 
stone (if there had been ships then and no trees in 
the way), here and there a tall chimney, — two or 
three brick piers for safes, one with a safe standing 
on it as calm as if nothing had happened, — piles of 
smoking masonry, the burnt stump of the flagstaff 
[80 1 



The Boston Fire of November 9-10, 1872 



THE BOSTON FIRE 

in Franklin Street, groups of people looking to see 
where their stores were, or hunting for their safes, 
or round a fire-engine which was playing on the 
ruins that covered a safe, to cool them, so it could 
be got out, — cordons of military and of the police 
keeping off the crowds of people who have flocked 
from all over the country, etc., etc. . . . Everybody 
seems to bear up cheerfully and hopefully against 
the disaster, and the only thought seems to be how 
best and soonest to repair damages. 

Things are going on pretty regularly. Froude is 
here lecturing; I went to hear him Thursday, and 
was interested. . . . After the lecture we had a pleas- 
ant meeting of the Historical Society at Mr. J. A. 
Lowell's, where Froude was present. Winthrop 
read a long and really very interesting account of 
the fires which had happened in Boston since its 
settlement, beginning with Cotton Mather's ac- 
count of different ones, and coming down to the 
"Great Fire" of 1760. Much of what he read I find 
in Drake's *' History of Boston," from which I also 
learn that the ** Great Fire" began in the house of 
Mrs. Mary Jackson and Son at the sign of the Bra- 
zen Head in Cornhill, and that all the buildings on 
[ 81 ] 



DR. HOLMES'S BOSTON 

Colonel Wendell's wharf were burned. My mother 
used to tell me that her grandfather (Col. W.) lost 
forty buildings in that fire, which always made me 
feel grand, as being the descendant of one that hath 
had losses, — in fact makes me feel a little grand 
now, in telling you of it. Most people's grandfathers 
in Boston, to say nothing of their great-grand-fa- 
thers, got their living working in their shirt-sleeves, 
but when a man's g.g. lost forty buildings, it is 
almost up to your sixteen quarterings that you 
know so much about in your Austrian experience. 

O vision of that sleepless night, 

What hue shall paint the mocking Hght 

That burned and stained the orient skies 

Where peaceful morning loves to rise, 

As if the sun had lost his way 

And dawned to make a second day, — 

Above how red with fiery glow. 

How dark to those it woke below ! 

On roof and wall, on dome and spire. 
Flashed the false jewels of the fire; 
Girt with her belt of glittering panes, 
And crowned with starry-gleaming vanes, 
Our northern queen in glory shone 
With new-born splendors not her own, 
And stood, transfigured in our eyes, 
A victim decked for sacrifice! 

[ 82] 



THE BOSTON FIRE 

The cloud still hovers overhead, 

And still the midnight sky is red; 

As the lost wanderer strays alone 

To seek the place he called his own, 

His devious footprints sadly tell 

How changed the pathways known so well; 

The scene, how new ! The tale, how old 

Ere yet the ashes have grown cold! 

[In the summer of 1873, Holmes writes to Motley 
from the resort which was christened by his friend 
Appleton, "Cold roast Boston."] 

May I gossip a few minutes? I write, you see, 
from Nahant, where I have been during July and 
August, staying with my wife in the cottage you 
must remember as Mr. Charles Amory's. ... So I 
have been here, as I said, playing cuckoo in the nest, 
with my wife, who enjoys Nahant much more than 
I do — having had more or less of asthma to take 
off from my pleasures. Still, there has been much 
that is agreeable, and as a change from city life I 
have found it a kind of refreshment. 

Many of your old friends are our neighbors. 
Longfellow is hard by, with Tom Appleton in the 
same house, and for a fortnight or so Sumner as 
his guest. Sumner, who was very nearly killed and 
buried by the newspapers, seems as well as ever, 
[83] 



DR. HOLMES'S BOSTON 

and gave us famous accounts of what he did and 
saw in England. ... I have dined since I have been 
here at Mr. George Peabody's with Longfellow, 
Sumner, Appleton, and William Amory; at Cabot 
Lodge's with nearly the same company; at Mr. 
James's with L. and S., and at Longfellow's en 
famille, pretty nearly. Very pleasant dinners. . . . 
Nahant is a gossipy Little Peddington kind of a 
place. As Alcibiades and his dog are not here, they 
are prattling and speculating and worrying about 
the cost of Mr. J 's new house, which, exter- 
nally at least, is the handsomest country house I ever 
saWi and is generally allowed to be a great success. 
The inside is hardly finished, except the hall and the 
dining-room, which are very fine. . . . On Monday 
we go back to Boston after two months' stay. 

[In the following spring he again writes to Motley.] 

I have come down — or got up — to dinner- 
parties as the substantial basis of my social life. 
They have slacked off (Novanglice) of late, so that 
I am now as domestic as a gallinaceous fowl, in 
place of chirruping and flitting from bough to bough. 

In the mean time I have my little grandchild to 
remind me I must not think too much of the pomps 
[84] 



THE BOSTON FIRE 

and vanities of the world, with two generations 
crowding me along. . . . We are all well, and living 
along in our quiet way with as much comfort as we 
have any right to, and more than most people have 
to content themselves with. I have only one trouble 
I cannot get rid of, namely, that they tease me to 
write for every conceivable anniversary. I wrote a 
hymn which was sung at the delivery of Schurz's 
Eulogy. Waldo Higginson came this afternoon to 
get me to write a hymn for the dedication — no — 
the opening or completion, of the Memorial Hall. 
You remember Sydney Smith's John Bull — how 
he "blubbers and subscribes," — I scold and con- 
sent. 

(dedication of memorial hall, JUNE 23, 1874) 

Where, girt around by savage foes, 
Our nurturing Mother's shelter rose, 
Behold, the lofty temple stands. 
Reared by her children's grateful hands! 

Firm are the pillars that defy 
The volleyed thunders of the sky; 
Sweet are the summer wreaths that twine 
With bud and flower our martyrs' shrine. 

The hues their tattered colors bore 
Fall mingling on the sunUt floor 

[85 1 



DR. HOLMES'S BOSTON 

Till evening spreads her spangled pall. 
And wraps in shade the storied hall. 

Firm were their hearts in danger's hour. 
Sweet was their manhood's morning flower, 
Their hopes with rainbow hues were bright, — 
How swiftly winged the sudden night! 

O Mother! on thy marble page 
Thy children read, from age to age, 
The mighty word that upward leads 
Through noble thought to nobler deeds. 

[In July, 1874, Holmes writes of a summer spent in 
Boston.] 

We are living in a desert. I feel, as I walk down 
Beacon Street, as if I were Lord Macaulay's New 
Zealander. I expect to start a fox or a woodchuck 
as I turn through Clarendon or Dartmouth Street, 
and to hear the whir of the partridge in Common- 
wealth Avenue. The truth is I have no country 
place of my own, and we are so much more comfort- 
able in our own house here that we can hardly make 
up our minds to go to any strange place in the coun- 
try, or by the seashore. 

You think I am wedded to the pavement. True, 
but I am also passionately fond of the country, 
only I am so liable to suffer from asthma when I get 
[86] 



THE BOSTON FIRE 

off the brick sidewalk that I am virtually impris- 
oned, except when I can arrange my conditions in 
the most favorable way, in a way that happens to 
agree with me. . . . Few people enjoy better health 
than I do just so long as I am let alone and regulate 
my own habits; but when others want me to wear 
their shoes, how they do chafe and pinch ! I think, 
if I am unsocial, it is quite as much by constitution 
as it is by any want of the social instinct, and I have 
learned to judge others very charitably in the study 
of my own weakness. 

Our neighbors of Manhattan have an excellent 
jest about our crooked streets which, if they were a 
little more familiar with a native author of unques- 
tionable veracity, they would strike out from the 
letter of "Our Boston Correspondent" where there 
is a source of perennial hilarity. It is worth while to 
reprint, for the benefit of whom it may concern, a 
paragraph from the authentic history of the vener- 
able Diedrich Knickerbocker: — 

"The sage council, as has been mentioned in a 
preceding chapter, not being able to determine upon 
any plan for the building of their city, — the cows 
in a laudable fit of patriotism, took it under their 
peculiar charge, and as they went to and from pas- 
[87] 



DR. HOLMES'S BOSTON 

ture, established paths through the bushes, on each 
side of which the good folks built their houses; 
which is one cause of the rambling and picturesque 
turns and labyrinths, which distinguish certain 
streets of New York at this very day." 

To compare the situations of any dwellings in 
either of the great cities with those which look upon 
the Common, the Public Garden, the waters of the 
Back Bay, would be to take an unfair advantage of 
Fifth Avenue and Walnut Street. St. Botolph's 
daughter dresses in plainer clothes than her more 
stately sisters, but she wears an emerald on her 
right hand and a diamond on her left that Cybele 
herself need not be ashamed of. 

While the inhabitants of Albany and Augusta are 
listening for the cracking and grinding of the break- 
ing ice in their rivers, the Bostonians are looking for 
the crocuses and snow-drops in the Beacon Street 
front-yards. Boston is said to be in latitude 42° and 
something more, but Beacon Street is practically 
not higher than 40°, on account of its fine southern 
exposure. Not long after the pretty show of crocuses 
has made the borders look gay behind the iron 
fences, a faint suspicion arises in the mind of the 
[88] 



THE BOSTON FIRE 

interested spectator that the brown grass on the 
banks of the Common and the terraces of the State 
House is getting a httle greenish. The change shows 
first in the creases and on the slopes, and one hardly 
knows whether it is fancy or not. There is also a 
spotty look about some of the naked trees that we 
had not noticed before, yes, the buds are sweUing. 
The breaking-up of the ice on the Frog Pond ought 
to have been as carefully noted as that of the Hud- 
son and Kennebec but it seems to have been neg- 
lected by local observers. If anybody would take the 
trouble to keep the record of the leafing and flower- 
ing of the trees on the Common, of the first coming 
of the birds, of the day when the first schooner 
passes West Boston Bridge, it would add a great 
deal to the pleasure of our spring walks through the 
malls, and out to the learned city beyond the river, 
because dull isolated facts become interesting by 
comparison. But one must go to the country to find 
people who care enough about these matters, and 
who are constantly enough in the midst of the 
sights and sounds of the opening year to take cogni- 
zance of the order of that grand procession, with 
March blowing his trumpet at the head of it, and 
April following with her green flag, and the rest 
[89 1 



DR. HOLMES'S BOSTON 

coming in their turn, till February brings up the 
rear with his white banner. 

Around the green, in morning light. 

The spired and palaced summits blaze, 
And, sunlike, from her Beacon-height 

The dome-crowned city spreads her rays; 
They span the waves, they belt the plains, 

They skirt the roads with bands of white. 
Till with a flash of gilded panes 

Yon farthest hillside bounds the sight. 
Peace, Freedom, Wealth! no fairer view, 

Though with the wild-bird's restless wings 
We sailed beneath the noontide's blue 

Or chased the moonlight's endless rings! 
Here, fitly raised by grateful hands 

His holiest memory to recall. 
The Hero's, Patriot's image stands; 

He led our sires who won them all! 



CHAPTER V 

BOSTON VERSUS ENGLAND 

1877 



This is your month, the month of "perfect days,** 
Birds in full song and blossoms all ablaze. 
Nature herself your earliest welcome breathes, 
Spreads every leaflet, every bower inwreathes; 
Carpets her paths for your returning feet, 
Puts forth her best your coming steps to greet; 
And Heaven must surely find the earth in tune 
When Home, Sweet Home, exhales the breath of June. 

Eight years an exile! What a weary while 
Since first our herald sought the mother isle! 
His snow-white flag no churUsh wrong has soiled, — 
He left unchallenged, he returns unspoiled. 

Here let us keep him, here he saw the light, — 
His genius, wisdom, wit, are ours by right; 
And if we lose him our lament will be 
We have "five hundred" — not "as good as he.'* 



CHAPTER V 

BOSTON VERSUS ENGLAND 

1877 

["Boston has enough of England about it to make 
a good English Dictionary," wrote Dr. Holmes, who in 
recording his trans-Atlantic impressions delighted in 
reversing the customary method of his fellow-country- 
men and invariably made his comparisons tip the scales 
in favor of his native haunts. During Lowell's stay in 
England the Doctor, in his letters, frequently voiced 
his preference for his own land, and later celebrated 
Lowell's return, with a charming poetic tribute. 

He wrote to Lowell in 1877:] 

I WILL venture to say that the Boston postmark 
looks pleasantly on the back of a letter — for you 
have paid your debts before sailing, I do not ques- 
tion. 

I do not feel quite happy without reminding 
you once or twice in a year, or even a little oftener 
than that, that there is such a place as New Eng- 
land, and that you have some friends there who 
have not forgotten you, and who will be very glad 
to see you back again. 

[ 93 1 



DR. HOLMES'S BOSTON 
)!Miat can I say to interest you! The migrations 
of the Vicar and his wife from the blue bed to the 
brown were hardly more monotonous that the pen- 
dulum-swing of my existence, so far as all outward 
occurrences go. Yet hfe is never monotonous, abso- 
lutely, to me. I am a series of surprises to myself in 
the changes that years and ripening, and it may be 
a still further process which I need not name, bring 
about. The movement onward is like changing 
place in a picture gallery — the Hght fades from this 
picture and falls on that, so that you wonder where 
the first has gone to and see all at once the meaning 
of the other. Xot that I am so different from other 
people — there may be a dozen of me, mijuis my 
accidents, for aught I know — say rather ten thou- 
sand. But what a strange thing life is when you 
have waded in up to your neck and remember the 
shelving sands you have trodden! 

You may get as much European epidermis as you 
like, the strigil will always show you to be at heart 
an unchanged and unchangeable New Englander. 
You are anchored here and though your cable is 
three thousand miles long, it will pull you home 
again by and by; at least so I beheve. That is just 
[ 94 ] 



BOSTON VERSUS ENGLAND 

what we like, — a man who can be at his ease in 
Court or cloister, and yet has a bit of Yankee back- 
bone that won't soften in spite of his knee-breeches, 
his having to be "with high consideration" and the 
rest. 

The Club has flourished greatly, and proved to 
all of us a source of the greatest dehght. I do not 
beUeve that there ever were such agreeable periodi- 
cal meetings in Boston as these we have had at 
Parker's. We have missed you of course, but your 
memon' and your reputation were with us. The 
magazine which you helped to give a start to has 
prospered, since its transfer to Ticknor k Fields. 

I should like ven' much to hear something of your 
even'-day experiences of English life, — how you 
like the different classes of English people you meet, 
— the scholars, the upper class, and the average 
folk that you may have to deal with. You know 
that, to a Bostonian, there is nothing like a Bos- 
tonian's impression of a new people or mode of life. 
We cany- the Common in our heads as the unit of 
space, the State House as her standard of architec- 
ture, and measure off men in Edward Everetts as 
with a yard-stick. 

[95] 



DR. HOLMES'S BOSTON 
Perhaps you would like a word or two about the 
Club. No meeting the last Saturday of December, 
that being the 25th. The last of November we had 
a very good meeting for these degenerate days — 
Emerson hors de combat, mainly, Agassiz dead, 
Longfellow an absentee, Lowell representing — the 
Club — at her Imperial Majesty's Court. I feel like 
old Nestor talking of his companions of earHer days 

— divine Polj^hemus, godlike Theseus, and the 
rest, — "men like these I have not seen and shall 
never look on their like" — at least until you come 
back and we have Longfellow and all that is left of 
Emerson to meet you. I say "all that is left." It is 
the machinery of thought that moves with diffi- 
culty, especially the memory, but we can hardly 
hope that the other mental powers will not fade 
as that has faded. 

Emerson is gently fading out like a photograph 

— the outlines are all there, but the details are 
getting fainter. 

When I think of myself slowly oxydating in my 
quiet village life, and of you in the centre of every- 
thing, yourself a centre, I smile at the contrast, and 
wonder whether you still remember there is such 
a corner of the universe as that from which I am 
[96] 



State Street, from an Engraving made about 18Jf.2 




"rt^sf^teisi-^:- yfi 




BOSTON VERSUS ENGLAND 

writing. . . . You must be what our people call '*a 
great success" in England; now come home (when 
you are ready) and you shall be Sir Oracle — not 
Magnus but Maximus Apollo, among your own 
admiring fellow-citizens. 

This is our place of meeting; opposite 
That towered and pillared building: look at it; 
King's Chapel in the Second George's day. 
Rebellion stole its regal name away, — 
Stone Chapel soimded better; but at last 
The poisoned name of our provincial past 
Had lost its ancient venom; then once more 
Stone Chapel was King's Chapel as before. 

Next the old church your wandering eye will meet — 
A granite pile that stares upon the street — 
Our civic temple; slanderous tongues have said 
Its shape was modelled from St. Botolph's head, 
Lofty, but narrow; jealous passers-by 
Say Boston always held her head too high. 

Turn half-way round, and let your look survey 
The white facade that gleams across the way, — 
The many-windowed building, tall and wide. 
The palace-inn that shows its northern side 
In grateful shadow when the sunbeams beat 
The granite wall in summer's scorching heat. 
This is the place; whether its name you spell 
Tavern, or caravansera, or hotel. 
Would I could steal its echoes ! You should find 
Such store of vanished pleasures brought to mind: 

[ 97 1 



DR. HOLMES'S BOSTON 

Such feasts ! the laughs of many a jocund hour 
That shook the mortar from King George's tower; 
Such guests! What famous names its record boasts, 
Whose owners wander in the mob of ghosts ! 
Such stories ! every beam and plank is filled 
With juicy wit the joyous talkers spilled. 

[Lowell testified to the brilliancy of the gatherings 
of the Saturday Club, when he wrote from the centre of 
London's most cultured circles: — "I have never seen 
society, on the whole, so good as I used to meet at our 
Saturday Club." 

In 1886, Dr. Holmes started with his daughter, Mrs. 
Sargent, upon a trip to Europe. He had not been 
abroad since his student days, and he remained four 
months, spending most of his time in England, where 
he was overwhelmed with attentions. His impressions 
of the old world at this time have been bequeathed us 
in one of his last volumes, " Our Hundred Days in Eu- 
rope." During this triumphal journey he amuses him- 
self, as was his wont, in comparing the conditions 
abroad with those at home:] 

When Dickens landed in Boston, he was struck 
with the brightness of all the objects he saw, — 
buildings, signs, and so forth. When I landed in 
Liverpool, everything looked very dark, very dingy, 
very massive, in the streets I drove through. So in 
London. . . . 

We went to the Lyceum Theatre to see Mr. Irving. 
[98] 



BOSTON VERSUS ENGLAND 

. . . Between the scenes we went behind the curtain, 
and saw the very curious and admirable machinery 
of the dramatic spectable. We made the acquaint- 
ance of several imps and demons, who were got up 
wonderfully well. Ellen Terry was as fascinating as 
ever. I remember that once before I had met her and 
Mr. Irving behind the scenes. It was at the Boston 
Theatre, and while I was talking with them a very 
heavy piece of scenery came crashing down, and 
filled the whole place with dust. It was but a short 
distance from where we were standmg, and I could 
not help thinking how near our several life-dramas 
came to a simultaneous exeunt omnes. 

To one whose eyes are used to Park Street and 
the Old South steeples as the standards of height, a 
spire which climbs four hundred feet towards the sky 
is a new sensation. . . . 

Cheyne (pronounced "Chainie") Walk is a some- 
what extended range of buildings. Cheyne Row is a 
passage which reminded me a little of my old habitat, 
Montgomery Place, now Bosw^orth Street. 

There are three grades of recognition, entirely 
distinct from each other in the meeting of two per- 
sons from different countries who speak the same 
[99 ] 



DR. HOLMES'S BOSTON 

language, — an American and an Englishman, for 
instance; the meeting of two Americans from differ- 
ent cities, as of a Bostonian and a New Yorker or a 
Chicagoan; and the meeting of two from the same 
city, as of two Bostonians. . . . Let me give a few 
practical examples. An American and an English- 
man meet in a foreign land. The Enghshman has 
occasion to mention his weight, which he finds has 
gained in the course of his travels. "How much is it 
now.f^" asks the American. "Fourteen stone. How 
much do you weigh .^" "Within four pounds of two 
hundred." Neither of them takes at once any clear 
idea of what the other weighs. The American has 
never thought of his own, or his friends', or anybody's 
weight in stones of fourteen pounds. The English- 
man has never thought of any one's weight in 'pounds. 
They can calculate very well with a slip of paper and 
a pencil, but not the less is their language but half 
intelligible as they speak and listen. The same thing 
is in a measure true of other matters they talk about. 
"It is about as large a space as the Common," says 
the Boston man. "It is about as large as St. James's 
Park," says the Londoner. "As high as the State 
House," says the Bostonian, or "as tall as Bunker 
Hill Monument," or "about as big as the Frog 
[ 100] 



Park Street Church 



BOSTON VERSUS ENGLAND 

Pond," where the Londoner would take St. Paul's, 
the Nelson Column, the Serpentine, as his standard 
of comparison. The difference in scale does not stop 
here : it runs through a greater part of the objects of 
thought and conversation. . . . Conversation between 
two Londoners, two New Yorkers, two Bostonians, 
requires no footnotes, which is a great advantage in 
their intercourse. . . . How well they understand 
each other ! Thirty-two degrees marks the freezing- 
point. Two hundred and twelve marks the boiling 
point. They have the same scale, the same fixed 
points, the same record — and no wonder they pre- 
fer each other's company! 

We Boston people are so bright and wide-awake, 
and have been really so much in advance of our 
fellow-barbarians with our "Monthly Anthologies," 
and "^Atlantic MonthHes," and " North American 
Reviews," that we have been in danger of thinking 
our local scale was the absolute one of excellence — 
forgetting that 212 Fahrenheit is but 100 Centigrade. 
That is one way of looking at ourselves ; and the other, 
as you know, is looking on ourselves as intellectual 
colonial dependents, and accepting that "certain con- 
descension in foreigners," which you [Lowell] have so 
deHciously exploded, as all that we are entitled to." 
\ 101 1 



DR. HOLMES'S BOSTON 

The 17th of June is memorable in the annals of my 
country. On that day in the year 1775 the battle of 
Bunker's Hill was fought on the height I see from the 
window of my Hbrary , where I am now writing. The 
monument raised in memory of our defeat, which was 
in truth a victory, is almost as much a part of the 
furniture of my room as its chairs and tables; out- 
side, as they are inside, furniture. But the 17th of 
June 1886, is memorable to me above all other anni- 
versaries of that day I have known. For on that day 
I received from the ancient University of Cambridge, 
England, the degree of Doctor of Letters, '' Doctor 
Litt.," in its abbreviated academic form. The honor 
was an unexpected one" that is, until a short time 
before it was conferred. 

In looking at the monuments which I saw in Lon- 
don and elsewhere in England, certain resemblances, 
comparisons, parallels, contrasts, and suggestions 
obtruded themselves upon my consciousness. We 
have one steeple in Boston which to my eyes seems 
absolutely perfect: that of the Central Church, at 
the corner of Newbury and Berkeley streets. Its 
resemblance to the spire of Salisbury had always 
struck me. On mentioning this to the late Mr. Rich- 
[ 102 1 



BOSTON VERSUS ENGLAND 

ardson, the very distinguished architect, he said to 
me that he thought it more hke that of the Cathedral 
of Chartres. One of the best hving architects agreed 
with me as to the similarity to that of Salisbury. It 
does not copy either exactly, but, if it had twice its 
actual dimensions, would compare well with the best 
of the two, if one is better than the other. Saint- 
Martin-in-the-Fields made me feel as if I were in 
Boston. Our ArHngton Street Church copies it 
pretty closely, but Mr. Gilman left out the columns. 

On other shores, above their mouldering towns, 
In sullen pomp the tall cathedral frowns. 

Yet Faith's pure hymn, beneath its shelter rude. 
Breathes out as sweetly to the tangled wood 
As where the rays through pictured glories pour 
On marble shaft and tessellated floor; — 
Heaven asks no surpUce round the heart that feels, 
And all is holy where devotion kneels. 

As for the kind of monument such as I see from my 
library wmdow standing on the summit of Bunker 
Hill, and have recently seen for the first time at 
Washington, on a larger scale, I own that I think a 
built-up obelisk a poor affair as compared with an 
Egyptian monohth of the same form. It was a tri- 
umph of skill to quarry, to shape, to transport, to 
[ 103 1 



DR. HOLMES'S BOSTON 

cover with expressive symbols, to erect, such a stone 
as that which has been transferred to the Thames 
Embankment, or that which now stands in Central 
Park, New York. Each of its four sides is a page of 
history, written so as to endure through a score of 
centuries. A built-up obelisk requires very little 
more than brute labor. A child can shape its model 
from a carrot or a parsnip, and set it up in miniature 
with blocks of loaf sugar. It teaches nothing, and the 
stranger must go to his guide-book to know what it is 
there for. I was led into many reflections by a sight 
of the Washington Monument. I found it was almost 
the same thing at a mile's distance as the Bunker 
Hill Monument at half a mile's distance; and unless 
the eye had some means of measuring the space be- 
tween itself and the stone shaft, one was about as 
good as the other. 

What better provision can be made for mortal 
man than such as our own Boston can afford its 
wealthy children? A palace on Commonwealth 
Avenue or on Beacon Street; a country -place at 
Framingham or Lenox; a seaside residence at Na- 
hant, Beverly Farms, Newport, or Bar Harbor; a 
pew at Trinity or King's Chapel; a tomb at Mount 
Auburn, or Forest Hills; with the prospect of a 
[ 104 ] 



Boston from the Public Garden, aboiU 1880 



BOSTON VERSUS ENGLAND 

memorial stained-window after his lamented demise, 
— is not that a pretty programme to offer a can- 
didate for hmnan existence? 

I, for one, being myself as inveterately rooted an 
American of the Boston variety as ever saw himself 
mirrored in the Frog Pond, hope that the exchanges 
of emigrants and re-emigrants will be much more 
evenly balanced by and by than at present. I hope 
that more Englishmen like James Smithson will help 
to build up our scientific and hterar\' institutions. I 
hope that more Americans like George Peabody will 
call down the blessings of the English people by noble 
benefactions to the cause of charity. It was with 
deep feeUngs of pride and gratitude that I looked up- 
on the bust of Longfellow, holding its place among 
the monuments of England's greatest and best chil- 
dren. I see with equal pleasure and pride that one of 
our o^vn large-hearted countrymen has honored the 
memoiy of three EngHsh poets, Milton, Herbert, and 
Cowper, by the gift of two beautiful stained-win- 
dows, and with still ampler munificence is erecting 
a stately fountain in the birthplace of Shakespeare. 
Such acts as these make us feel more and more the 
truth of the generous sentiment which closes the 
[ 105 1 



DR. HOLMES'S BOSTON 

ode of "^'ashington Allston, "America to Great Bri- 
tain'*: "We are onel" 

Let not the too mature traveller think it [travel- 
ling] will change any of his habits. It will interrupt 
his routine for a while, and then he will settle down 
into his former self, and be just what he was before. 
I brought home a pair of shoes I had made in London; 
they do not fit like those I had before I left, and I 
rarely wear them. It is just so with the new habits 
I formed and the old ones I left behind me. 

After memorable inten'iews, and kindest hospi- 
tahties, and grand sights, and huge influx of patri- 
otic pride, — for even' American owns all America, — 
I come back with the feeling which a boned turkey 
might experience, if, retaining his consciousness, he 
were allowed to resume his skeleton. 

Welcome, O Fighting Gladiator, and Recumbent 
Cleopatra, and Dying Warrior (reproduced in the 
calcined mineral of Lutetia) that crown my loaded 
shelves! Welcome, ye triumphs of pictorial art (re- 
peated by the magic graver) that look do^Ti from the 
walls of my sacred cell ! . . . The old books look out 
from the shelves, and I seem to read on their backs 
[ 106 ] 



BOSTON VERSUS ENGLAND 

something besides their titles, — a kind of solemn 
greeting. The crimson carpet flushes warm mider 
my feet. The arm-chair hugs me; the swivel-chair 
spins round ^N^ith me, as if it were giddy with pleas- 
ure; the vast recumbent fauteuil stretches itself out 
under my weight, as one joyous with food and wine 
stretches in after-dioner laughter. 

New England, we love thee; no time can erase 
From the hearts of thy children the smile on thy face. 
'T is the mothers fond look of affection and pride. 
As she gives her fair son to the arms of his bride. 

Here 's to aU the good people, wherever they be, 
\Mio have grown in the shade of the liberty-tree; 
We all love its leaves, and its blossoms and fruit. 
But pray have a care of the fence round its root. 

We should like to talk big; it 's a kind of a right, 
\Mien the tongue has got loose and the waistband 

grown tight ; 
But, as pretty ^liss Prudence remarked to her beau. 
On its own heap of compost, no biddy should crow. 

Enough! There are gentlemen waiting to talk, 
"VMiose words are to mine as the flower to the stalk. 
Stand by your old mother whatever befall; 
God bless all her children! Good night to you all! 



CHAPTER VL 
"THE HUB" 



Thz -\r^el spd^e: '-This threefold hill shall be 
The home of Aits, the nurse of Libertv ! 
Oar stat^ summit from its shaft shall pour 
Its deep-ied blaze along the darkened shore; 
Kiiblem ol thoughts that, kindhng far and wide. 
In danger's night shall be a nation's guide. 
One swelling crest the citadd shall crown. 
Its slanted bastions black with battle's frown. 
And bid the sons that tread its scowling heights 
Bare thor strong arms for man and all his rightsi 
One silent steep along the northern wave 
Shall hold the patriarch's and the hero's grave: 
When fades the torch, when o'er the peaceful scene 
The embattled fortress smiles in Hving green, 
The cross of Faith, the anchor staff of Hope, 
Shall stand eternal on its grassy slope: 
There through aU time shall faithful memory tell 
" Here virtue toiled, and Patriot valor fell; 
Thy free, proud fathers slumber at thy side; 
Live as they lived, or perish as they died.'" 



CHAPTER VI 

"THE HUB" 

I LOTZ this old place where I was bom: the heart 
of the world beats under the three hills of Boston, 
Sirl I love this great land with so many tall men in 
it, and so many good, noble women. 

A man can see further, Sir, — he said one day, — 
from the top of Boston State House, and see more 
that is worth seeing, than from all the pyramids and 
turrets and steeples in all the plac-es in the world I 
No smoke, Sir; no fog. Sir; and a clean sweep from 
the Outer Light and the sea beyond it to the Xew 
Hampshire mountains I Yes, Sir, — and there are 
great truths that are higher than mountains and 
broader than seas, that people are looking for from 
the tops of these hills of ours, — such as the world 
never saw, though it might have seen them at 
Jerusalem, if its eyes had been open! 

It's a slow business, this of getting the ark 

launched. The Jordan was n't deep enough, and 

the Tiber was n't deep enough, and the Rhone was 

n't deep enough, — and perhaps the Charles is n't 

[111] 



DR. HOLMES'S BOSTON 

deep enough; but I don't feel sure of that, Sir, and I 
love to hear the workmen knocking at the old blocks 
of tradition and making the ways smooth with the 
oil of the Good Samaritan. I don't know, Sir, — 
but I do think she stirs a Httle, I do believe she 
slides; and when I think of what a work that is for 
the dear old three-breasted mother of American 
liberty, I would not take all the glory of all the 
greatest cities in the world for my birthright in the 
soil of little Boston ! 

A new race, and a whole new world for the new- 
born human soul to work in! And Boston is the 
brain of it, and has been any time these three 
hundred years! That's all I claim for Boston, — 
that it is the thinking centre of the continent, and 
therefore of the planet. . . . Don't talk to me of 
modesty, I 'm past that ! There is n't a thing that 
was ever said or done in Boston, from pitching tea 
overboard to the last ecclesiastical lie it tore to 
tatters and flung into the dock, that was n't thought 
very indelicate by some fool or tyrant or bigot, and 
all the entrails of commercial and spiritual conserv- 
atism are twisted into colics as often as this revo- 
lutionary brain of ours has a fit of thinking come 
over it. 

[ 112] 



•'THE HUB" 

When I heard the young fellow's exclamation, I 
looked round the table with curiosity . . . what I 
heard began so: — 

— By the Frog Pond, when there were frogs in it, 
and the folks used to come down from the tents on 
'Lection and Independence days with their pails to 
get water to make egg-pop with. Born in Boston; 
went to school in Boston as long as the boys would 
let me. — The little man groaned, turned, as if to 
look round, and went on. — Ran away from school 
one day to see Phillips hung for killing Denegri with 
a loggerhead. That was in flip days, when there 
were alwaj^s two or three loggerheads in the fire. 
I 'm a Boston boy, I tell you, — born at the North 
End, and mean to be buried on Copp's Hill, with 
the good undergroimd people, — the Worthylakes, 
and the rest of 'em. Yes, Sir, — up on the old 
hill, where they buried Captain Daniel Malcolm 
in a stone grave, ten feet deep, to keep him safe 
from the red-coats, in these old times when the 
world was frozen up tight and there was n't but one 
spot open, and that was right over Faneuil Hall, — 
and black enough it looked, I tell you! There's 
where my bones shall he. Sir, and rattle away when 
the big guns go off at the Navy Yard opposite ! Full 
[ 113] 



DR. HOLMES'S BOSTON 
of crooked little streets; — but I tell you Boston 
has opened, and kept open, more turnpikes that 
lead straight to free thought and free speech and 
free deeds than any other city of Uve men or dead 
men, — I don't care how broad their streets are, 
nor how high their steeples ! 

— How high is Bosting meet'n' house? — said a 
person with black whiskers and imperial. . . . 

— How high? said the Uttle man. — As high as 
the first step of the stairs that lead to the New 
Jerusalem. Is n't that high enough? 

— It is, — I said. The great end of being is to 
harmonize man with the order of things, and the 
church has been a good pitch-pipe, and may be so 
still. But who shall tune the pitch-pipe? 

— Were you born in Boston, Sir? — said the little 
man, — looking eager and excited. 

I was not, — I rephed. 

— It 's a pity, — it 's a pity, — said the httle man; 
— it 's the place to be born in. But if you can't fix 
it so as to be born here, you can come and live here. 
Old Ben Franklin, the father of American science 
and the American Union, wasn't ashamed to be 

[ m] 



The Frog Pond 



*'THE HUB" 
born here. Jim Otis, the father of American Inde- 
pendence, bothered about the Cape Cod marshes 
awhile, but he came to Boston as soon as he got big 
enough. Joe Warren the first bloody ruffled-shirt of 
the Revolution, was as good as born here. Parson 
Channing strolled along this way from Newport, 
and stayed here. Pity old Sam Hopkins hadn't 
come too; we'd have made a man of him, — poor, 
dear, good old Christian heathen! There he lies, 
as peaceful as a yoxmg baby in the old burying- 
ground ! I 've stood on the slab many a time . . . 
this is the great Macadamizing place, — always 
cracking up something. 

— Cracking up Boston folks, — said the gentle- 
man with the diamond-pin. 

I never thought he would come to good when I 
heard him attempting to sneer at an unoffending 
city so respectable as Boston. After a man begins 
to attack the State House, when he gets bitter 
about the Frog Pond, you may be sure there is not 
much left of him. Poor Edgar Poe died in the 
hospital soon after he got into this way of talking; 
and so sure as you find an unfortunate fellow re- 
duced to this pass, you had better begin praying for 
[ 115 ] 



DR. HOLMES'S BOSTON 

bim, and stop lending him money, for he is on his 
last legs. Remember poor Edgar! He is dead and 
gone; but the State House has its cupola fresh- 
gilded, and the Frog Pond has got a fountain that 
squirts up a hundred feet into the air and glorifies 
that humble sheet with a fine display of provincial 
rainbows. 

I question everything; but if I find Bunker Hill 
Monument standing as straight as when I leaned 
against it a year or ten years ago, I am not much 
afraid that Bunker Hill will cave in if I trust myself 
again on the soil of it. . . . 

The Monument is an a^^ful place to visit, I said. 
The waves of time are hke the waves of the ocean; 
the only thing they beat against without destroy- 
ing it is a rock; and thej" destroy that at last. But 
it takes a good while. There is a stone now stand- 
ing in very good order that was as old as a monu- 
ment of Louis XIV and Queen Anne's day is now 
when Joseph went down into Egji^t. Think of the 
shaft on Bunker Hill standing in the sunshine on 
the morning of January 1st in the year 5872! 

— It won't be standing, — the Master said. — AYe 
are poor bunglers compared to those old Egj^tians. 
There are no joints in one of their obehsks. . . . 
[ 116] 



**THE HUB" 
I was thinking of something very different. I 
was indulging a fancy of mine about the Man who 
is to sit at the foot of the Monument for one, or 
may be two or three thousand years. x\s long as 
the monument stands there and there is a city near 
it, there will always be a man to take the names of 
visitors and extract a small tribute from their 
pockets, I suppose. I sometimes get to thinking of 
the long, unbroken succession of these men, until 
they come to look like one Man; continuous in be- 
ing unchanging as the stone he watches, looking 
upon the successive generations of human beings 
as they come and go, and out-living all the dynas- 
ties of the world in all probability. It has come to 
pass that I never speak to the Man of the Monu- 
ment without wanting to take off my hat and feel- 
ing as if I were looking down the vista of twenty 
or thirty centuries. 

— Sin has many tools but a lie is the handle 
which fits them all. 

— I think. Sir, — said the divinity student, you 
must intend that for one of the sayings of the Seven 
Wise Men of Boston you were speaking of the other 
day. 

[ 117] 



DR. HOLMESS BOSTON 
— I thank you my young friend, — was my reply, 
— but I must say something better than that, be- 
fore I could pretend to fill out the number. 

The schoolmistress wanted to know how many 
of these sayings were on record, and what, and by 
whom said. 

— TVLy, let us see. — there is that one of Benja- 
min Franklin, *'the great Bostonian,*" ... To be 
sure, he said a great many wise things, — and I 
don't feel sure he did n't borrow this, — he speaks 
as if it were old. But then he apphed it so neatly I — 

"He that has onc-e done you a kindness will be 
more ready to do you another than he whom you 
yourself have obhged." 

— Then there is that glorious Epicurian paradox, 
uttered by my friend, the Historian, in one of his 
flashing moments : — 

''Give us the luxuries of life, and we will dis- 
p>ense with its necessities." 

— To these must certainly be added that other 
saying of one of the wittiest of men : — 

"Good Americans, when they die, go to Paris." 
The divinity student looked grave at this, but 
said nothing. 

The schoolmistress spoke out, and said she did n't 
[ 118 1 



''THE HUB" 

think the wit meant any irreverence. It was only 
another way of saying, Paris is a heavenly place 
after New York, or Boston. 

A jaunty-looking person, who had come in with 
the yomig fellow they call John, — evidently a 
stranger, — said there was one more wise man's 
saj-ing that he had heard; it was about our place, 
but he didn't know who said it. A civil curiosity 
was manifested by the company to hear the fourth 
wise saj-ing. I heard him distinctly whispering to 
the young fellow who brought him to dinner, Shall 
I tell it ? To which the answer was. Go ahead I — 
Well, — he said, — this was what I heard: — 

"Boston State House is the hub of the solar 
system. You could n't pry that out of a Boston 
man if you had the tire of all creation straightened 
out for a crowbar,'' 

— Sir, I said, — I am gratified with your remark. 
It expresses with pleasing ^-ivacity that which I 
have sometimes heard uttered with malignant dul- 
ness. The satire of the remark is essentially true 
of Boston, — and of all other considerable. — and 
inconsiderable places with which I have had the 
pri\41ege of being acquainted. Cockneys think 
London is the only place in the world. Frenchmen 
[ 119] 



DR. HOLMES'S BOSTON 
— you remember the line about Paris, tbe Court, 
the World, etc. . . . "See Naples and die." It is 
quite as bad with smaller places. I have been 
about lecturing, you know, and have foimd the 
following propositions to hold true of all of them: — 

1. The axis of the earth sticks out \'isibly through 
the centre of each and every town and city. 

2. If more than fifty years have passed since its 
foundation, it is affectionately styled by the in- 
habitants the ''good old town of" — (whatever its 
name may happen to be). 

3. Even' collection of its inhabitants that 
comes together to listen to a stranger is invariably 
declared to be a "remarkably intelHgent audience." 

4. The cUmate of the place is particularly favor- 
able to longe\'ity. 

5. It contains several persons of vast talent httle 
known to the world. (One or two of them, you may 
remember, sent short pieces to the "PactoHan" 
some time since, which were "respectfully de- 
clined.") 

Boston is just like other places of its size; only 

perhaps, considering its excellent fish-market, paid 

fire-department, superior monthly pubhcations, 

and correct habit of spelling the English language, 

[120] 



The Old City Hall, 1858 



"THE HUB" 
it has some right to look down on the mob of cities. 
I'll tell you, though, if you want to know it, what 
is the real offense of Boston. It drains a large water- 
shed of its intellect, and will not itself be drained. 
If it would only send away its first-rate men, in- 
stead of its second-rate ones fno offense to the well- 
known exceptions, of which we are always proud), 
we should be spared such epigrammatic remarks as 
that which the gentleman has quoted. There can 
never be a real metropoUs in this countrs^ until the 
biggest centre can drain the lesser ones of their 
talent and wealth. 

You have seen our gilt dome, and no doubt you 've been told 
That the orbs of the universe round it are rolled; 
But I'll own it to you, and I ought to know best, 
That this is n't quite true of all stars of the West. 

You '11 go to Mount Auburn — we "11 show you the track, — 
And can stay there, — unless you prefer to come back; 
And Bunker's tall shaft you can cUmb if you will, 
But you '11 puff Uke a paragraph praising a pill. 

You must see — but you have seen — our old Faneuil Hall, 
Our churches, our school-rooms, our sample-rooms, all; 
And, perhaps, though the idiots must have their jokes, 
You have found our good people much like other folks. 

A bit of gilding here and there has a wonderful 
effect in enhvening a landscape or an apartment. 
[ 1^21 1 



DR. HOLMES'S BOSTON 
Xapoleon consoled the Parisians in their year of de- 
feat by gilding the dome of the Invalides. Boston 
glorified her State House and herself at the expense 
of a few sheets of gold leaf laid on the dome, which 
shines like a sun in the eyes of her citizens, and like a 
star in those of the approaching traveller. 

— There are no such women as the Boston wo- 
men. Sir, — he said. ... — But confound the make- 
beUeve women we have turned loose in our streets ! 
\Miere do they come from.^ Not out of Boston pariors, 
I trust. 'Why, there is n't a beast or a bird that would 
drag its tail through the dirt iQ the way these crea- 
tures do their dresses. Because a queen or a duchess 
wears long robes on great occasions, a maid-of-all- 
work or a facton'-girl thinks she must make herseK a 
nuisance by trailing through the street, picking up 
and carrying about with her — pah I — that 's what 
I call getting vulgarity- into your bones and marrow. 
Making beheve be what you are not is the essence 
of \'ulgarity. Show over dirt is the one attribute of 
\nilgar people. If any man can walk behind one of 
these women and see what she rakes up as she goes, 
and not feel squeamish, he has got a tough stomach. 
I would n't let one of 'em iato my room without 
[ 12-2 ] 



"THE HUB" 
servmg 'em as Da\'id served Saul at the cave of the 
wilderness, cut off his skirts, Sir I cut off his skirts. 
. . . Don't tell me that a true lady ever sacrifices the 
duty of keepiQg all about her sweet and clean to the 
wish of making a \'ulgar show. I won't beheve it of 
a lady. There are some things that no fashion has 
any right to touch, and cleanliness is one of those 
things. If a woman wishes to show that her husband 
or father has got money, which she wants to spend, 
but does n*t know how, let her buy a yard or two of 
silk and pin it to her dress when she goes out to walk, 
but let her unpin it before she goes into the house. 

[We] have had our sensibilities greatly worked 
upon, our patriotism chilled, our local pride outraged, 
by the monstrosities which have been allowed to de- 
form our beautiful pubhc grounds. We have to be 
ven' careful in conducting a ^'isito^, say from his 
marble-fronted hotel to the City Hall. Keep straight 
along after entering the Garden, — you will not care 
to inspect the httle figure of the mihtan- gentleman 
to your right. Yes, the Cochituate water is drinkable, 
but I think I would not turn aside to ^-isit that small 
fabric which makes beheve it is a temple and is a 
weak-eyed fountain feebly weeping over its insignifi- 
[ 1^23 ] 



DR. HOLMES'S BOSTON 

cance. About that other stone misfortune, cruelly 
reminding us of the "Boston Massacre," we will not 
discourse; it is not imposing, and is rarely spoken of. 

What a mortification to the inhabitants of a city 
with some hereditary and contemporary claims to 
cultivation; which has noble edifices, grand libraries, 
educational institutions of the highest grade, an art- 
gallery filled with the finest models and rich in paint- 
ing and statuary, — a stately city that stretches 
both arms across the Charles to clasp the hands of 
Harvard, her twin-sister, each lending lustre to the 
other like double stars, — what a pity that she should 
be so disfigured by crude attempts to adorn her and 
commemorate her past that her most loving children 
blush for her artificial deformities amidst the wealth 
of her natural beauties! One hardly knows which 
to groan over most sadly, — the tearing down of old 
monuments, the shelling of the Parthenon, the over- 
throw of the pillared temples of Rome, and in a 
humbler way the destruction of the old Hancock 
House, or the erection of monuments which are to be 
a perpetual eyesore to ourselves and our descendants. 

Ever since I paid ten cents for a peep through the 
telescope on the Common, and saw the transit of 
Venus, my whole idea of the creation has been singu- 
[ 124 1 



TJie Hancock House, on Beacon Street next to the State House 




-=^*IL- 



**THE HUB" 

larly changed. The planet I beheld was not much less 
in size than the one on which we hve. If I had been 
looking on (this) planet (from) outside its orbit, in- 
stead of looking on Venus, I should have seen nearly 
the same sight as that for which I was paying my 
dime. Is this Httle globule, no bigger than a marble, 
the Earth on which I Hve, mth all its oceans and 
continents, with all its tornadoes and volcanoes, its 
mighty cities, its myriads of inhabitants .^^ I have 
never got over the shock, as it were, of my discovery. 
There are some things we beheve but do not know, 
there are others that we know, but, in our habitual 
state of mind, hardly beheve. I know something of 
the relative size of the planets. I have seen Venus. 
The Earth on which I hve has never been the same 
to me since that time. 

All my human sentiments, all my rehgious behefs, 
all my conception of my relation in space for frac- 
tional rights in the universe, seemed to have under- 
gone a change. From this vast and vague confusion 
of all my standards I gradually returned to the more 
immediate phenomena about me. This httle globule 
evolved itself about me in its vast complexity and 
gradually regained its importance. In looking at our 
planet equipped and provisioned for a long voyage in 
[ 125 1 



DR. HOLMES'S BOSTON 
space, — its almost boundless stores of coal and 
other inflammable materials, its untired renewal of 
the forms of life, the ever growing control over the 
powers of Nature which its inhabitants are acquiring, 
— all these things point to its fitness for a duration 
transcending all our ordinary measures of time. 
These conditions render possible the only theory 
which can "justify the ways of God to man," namely, 
that this colony of the universe is an educational in- 
stitution so far as the human race is concerned. On 
this theory I base my hope for myself and my fellow- 
creatures. If, in the face of all the so-called evil to 
which I cannot close my eyes, I have managed to re- 
tain a cheerful optimism, it is because this educa- 
tional theory is the basis of my working creed. 

Alone ! no climber of an Alpine clifiP, 
No Arctic venturer on the waveless sea, 
Feels the dread stillness round him as it chills 
The heart of him who leaves the slumbering earth 
To watch the silent worlds that crowd the sky. 

So have I grown companion to myself. 

And to the wandering spirits of the air 

That smile and whisper round us in our dreams. 

Thus have I learned to search if I may know 

The whence and why of all beneath the stars 

And all beyond them, and to weigh my Hfe 

[ 126 1 



''THE HUB" 

As In a balance, — poising good and ill 

Against each other, — asking of the Power 

That flung me forth among the whirling worlds. 

If I am heir to any inborn right. 

Or only as an atom of the dust 

That every wdnd may blow where'er it will. 

It is here, Sir ! right here ! ... in this old new city 
of Boston, — this remote provincial corner of a pro- 
vincial nation, that the Battle of the Standard is 
fighting, and was fighting before we were born, and 
win be fighting when we are dead and gone, — 
please God! The battle goes on everywhere through- 
out civiHzation; but here, here, here is the broad 
white flag flying which proclaims, first of all, peace 
and good will to men, and next to that, the absolute, 
unconditional spiritual hberty of each individual 
immortal soul! The three-hilled city against the 
seven-hilled city! ... I swear to you, Sir, I believe 
that these two centres of civiHzation are just exactly 
the two points that close the circuit in the battery of 
our planetary inteUigence! ... we have got the new 
heavens and the new earth over us and under us! 
Was there ever anything in Italy, I should like to 
know, like a Boston sunset .^^ 

Yes, — Boston sunsets; perhaps they 're as good in 
[ 127 1 



DR. HOLMES'S BOSTON 

some other places but I know 'em best here. Any- 
how, the American skies are different from anything 
they see in the Old World. Yes, and the rocks are 
different, and eveni:hing that comes out of the soil, 
from grass to Indians, is different. 

I look at your faces, — I 'm sure there are some from 
The three-breasted mother I covmt as my own; 
You think you remember the place you have come from. 
But how it has changed in the years that have flown! 

Unaltered, 't is true, is the hall we call "Funnel," 

Still fights the "Old South" in the battle for hfe. 

But we've opened our door to the West through the tunnel. 

And we've cut oS Fort Hill with our Amazon Knife. 

You should see the new Westminster Boston has builded, — 
Its mansions, its spires, its museums of arts, — 
You should see the great dome we have gorgeously gilded; 
'T is the light of our eyes, 't is the joy of our hearts. 

WTien first in his path a young asteroid found it. 
As he sailed through the skies with the stars m his wake. 
He thought 't was the sun, and kept circling around it 
Till Edison signalled, "You 've made a mistake." 

We are proud of our city, — her fast -growing figure, 
The warp and the woof of her brain and her hands, — 
But we 're proudest of all that her heart has grown bigger. 
And warms with fresh blood as her girdle expands. 



CHAPTER VII 
BOSTON THE LECTURE CRADLE 



"Now, then, Professor, fortune has decreed 
That you, this evening, shall be first to read, — 
Lucky for us that listen, for in fact 
Who reads this poem must know how to ad." 

Right well she knew that in his greener age 
He had a mighty hankering for the stage. 
The patient audience had not long to wait; 
Pleased with his chance, he smiled and took the bait; 
Through his wild hair his coaxing fingers ran, — 
He spread the page before him and began. 



CHAPTER VII 

BOSTON THE LECTURE CRADLE 

[The " lecture-habit " of this country was in its heyday 
during Dr. Holmes's earlier years. Massachusetts was 
the cradle of the Lyceum, first organized in 1829, and 
Boston was the hand that rocked the cradle. The found- 
ing of the Lowell Institute, which occurred ten years 
later, was an occurrence of far-reaching importance. 
In the decade of 1849-50 the Lowell Lectures became 
a vital factor in the city's life, and Boston had the glory 
of being herself the principal source of supply. Among 
her sons who ornamented the lecture platform were 
Webster, Choate, Phillips, Channing, Sumner, Emer- 
son, Lowell, Starr King, Winthrop, Parker, James Free- 
man Clarke, Edward Everett Hale, and many others, 
among whom may be mentioned the ever-popular 
"Autocrat," who has amusingly described the typical 
audience of his early days.] 

Have I ever acted in private theatricals? Often. 
I have played the part of the "Poor Gentleman," be- 
fore a great many audiences, — more, I trust, than 
I shall ever face again. I did not wear a stage cos- 
tume, nor a wig, nor a mustache of burnt cork, but I 
was placarded and announced as a public performer, 
and at the proper hour I came forward with the ballet- 
[ 131 ] 



DR. HOLMES'S BOSTON 
dancer's smile upon my countenance, and made my 
bow and acted my part. I have seen my name stuck 
up in letters so big that I was ashamed to show my- 
self in the place by dayhght. I have gone to a town 
with a sober Hteran- essay in my pocket, and seen 
myself everj-^here annoimced as the most desperate 
of hu;ffos, — one who was obKged to restrain himself 
in the full exercise of his powers, from prudential 
considerations. I have been through as many hard- 
ships as Ulysses, in the pursuit of my histrionic voca- 
tion. I have travelled iu cars imtil the conductors 
all knew me like a brother. I have nm off the rails, 
and stuck all night in snow-drifts, and sat behind 
females that would have the window open when 
one could not wink without his eyehds freezing 
together. 

Two Lyceum assembhes, of five hundred each, are 
so near alike, that they are absolutely indistinguish- 
able in many cases by any definite mark, and there is 
nothiug but the place and time by which one can tell 
the "remarkably intelligent audience" of a town of 
Xew York, or Ohio, from one in any New England 
town of similar size. . . . One knows pretty well even 
the look the audience will have, before he goes in. 
[ 132 1 



BOSTON THE LECTURE CRADLE 
Front seats: a few old folks, — shiny-headed, — 
slant up best ear towards the speaker, — drop off 
asleep after a while, when air begins to get a Uttle 
narcotic with carbonic acid. Bright women's faces, 
young and middle-aged, a Kttle behind these, but 
toward the front, — (pick out the best and lecture 
mainly to that.) Here and there a countenance, sharp 
and scholarlike, and a dozen pretty female ones 
sprinkled about. An indefinite number of pairs of 
young people, — happy, but not always very atten- 
tive. Boys, in the background, more or less quiet! 
Dull faces, here, there, — in how many places I I 
don't say dull people, but faces without a ray of s^tu- 
pathy or movement of expression. They are what 
kill the lecturer. These negative faces with their 
vacuous eyes and stony lineaments pump and suck 
the warm soul out of him. 

[During his lecture-tours about the country. Dr. 
Holmes had an opportunity to study the character- 
istics of innumerable hotels and taverns.] 

Don't talk to me about taverns I There is just one 

genuine, clean, decent, palatable thing occasionally 

to be had in them — namely, a boiled egg. The soups 

taste pretty good sometimes, but their som-ces are 

[ 133 1 



DR. HOLMES'S BOSTON 

involved in a darker mystery than that of the Nile. 
Omelettes taste as if they had been carried in the 
waiter's hat, or fried in an old boot. I ordered scram- 
bled eggs one day. It must be they had been scram- 
bled for by somebody, but who — who in the posses- 
sion of sound reason could have scrambled for what 
I had set before me under that name.'^ . . . Then 
the waiters with their napkins — what don't they 
do with those napkins ! Mention any one thing of 
which you can say with truth, "That they do not 
do." 

No; give me a home, or a home like mine, where 
all is clean and sweet, where coffee has preexisted 
in the berrj^ and tea has still faint recollections 
of the pigtails that dangled about the plant from 
which it was picked, where butter has not the pre- 
vailing character which Pope assigned to Denham, 
where soup could look you in the face if it had 
"eyes" (which it has not), and where the comely 
Anne or the gracious Margaret takes the place of 
these napkin-bearing animals. 

[In 1876 Holmes writes to his friend Motley:] 

I am most devoutly thankful that my seven 
months' lectures are at last over, and I am gradu- 
[ 134 ] 



BOSTON THE LECTURE CRADLE 

ally beginning to come to myself, like one awaken- 
ing from a trance or a fit of intoxication. You 
know that the steady tramp of a regiment would 
rock the Menai bridge from its fastenings, and so 
all military bodies break their step in crossing it. 
This reiteration of lectures in even march, month 
after month, produces some such oscillations in one's 
mind, and he longs, after a certain time, to break 
up their uniformity. If they kept on long enough, 
Harvard would move to Somerville. . . . 

I have done enough to know what work means, 
and should think I had been a hard worker if I did 
not see what others have accomplished. I can never 
look on those great histories of yours and think 
what toil they cost, what dogged perseverance as 
well as higher qualities they imply, without feeling 
almost as if I had been an idler. 

[In response to one of the many appeals made him 
for patriotic poems, Dr. Holmes protests that there 
is a limit beyond which even the poet must refuse to go. 
He explains that he has recently done his part to "save 
the Old South."] 

I have lectured steadily seven months from Oc- 
tober to May, and have been writing for "The At- 
lantic" regularly since January, and I have promised 
[ 135 1 



DR. HOLMES'S BOSTON 

a gratuitous lecture to a "banquet " of ladies this 
autumn. It is enough for me, and I do not want to 
plague myself with pumping up patriotism and 
pouring it into stanzas. I want to get away as soon 
as I can and lay up my heels and do nothing but 
read story-books. 

"So easy! just sit down and write what comes 
into your head." Tell that to the merinoes — (I 
adapt the saying to the mountain district). 

Full sevenscore years our city's pride — 

The comely Southern spire — 
Has cast its shadow, and defied 

The storm, the foe, the fire; 
Sad is the sight our eyes behold; 

Woe to the three-hilled town, 
When through the land the tale is told — 

"The brave 'Old South' is down!" 

The darkened skies, alas! have seen 

Our monarch tree laid low. 
And spread in ruins o'er the green, 

But Nature struck the blow; 
No scheming thrift its downfall planned. 

It felt no edge of steel. 
No soulless hireling raised his hand 

The deadly stroke to deal. 

In bridal garlands, pale and mute. 
Still pleads the storied tower; 

[ 136 ] 



The Old South Church 




BOSTON THE LECTURE CRADLE 

These are the blossoms, but the fruit 

Awaits the golden shower; 
The spire still greets the morning sun, — 

Say, shall it stand or fall? 
Help, ere the spoiler has begun! 

Help, each, and God help all! 

It costs sw . . t; it costs nerve-fat; it costs phos- 
phorus, to do anything worth doing. 

I must excuse myself. I have given what I could 
spare to the "Old South" Fund. I have written a 
poem, — some verses, at any rate, — printed in 
the "Daily Advertiser" under the title "A Last 
Appeal," to stir up people as much as I knew how 
to. And now I have ground my tune and taken my 
hand-organ on my back, I cannot make up my 
mind to come back to the same doorstep and begin 
grinding again. Seriously and absolutely, you must 
call other street musicians. 

If I do not look out I shall have to write, instead 
of "The Song of the Shirt," "The Song of the 
Sheet " (of paper), and draw tears from the eyes of 
everybody by the picture : — 

With fingers weary and worn. 
With eyelids heavy and red, 
A scribbler holding a used-up pen 
Sat racking his used-up head. 

[ 137 ] 



DR. HOLMES'S BOSTON 

[In September, 1887, Holmes writes to a friend in 
Europe:] 

For the first time since some early date, whether 
A.D. or A. Mundi, I hardly know, I have got my 
harness off and am standing for a month or two in 
the stall, so to speak. In other words, I have no 
literary work in hand at this moment, and am 
lolling in a rocking-chair at my autumnal fireside. 

So let me have my sweet do-nothing, as the Ital- 
ians say; and let poor old Dobbin stand in the stall 
with his harness off, munching his hay and oats, and 
thinking when he is next to be trotted out, hoping 
it will not be yet awhile. 

I have lived so long stationary, that I have be- 
come intensely local, and doubtless in many ways 
narrow. I should like to breathe the air of the great 
outer world for a while, but I am so sure to suffer 
from asthmatic trouble, if I trust myself in strange 
places, that I consider myself as a kind of prisoner 
for life, and am very thankful that my condemned 
cell is so much to my liking. There are some valu- 
able qualities about an old provincial friend like me, 
to a cosmopolitan like yourself. He keeps the home 
flavor, a whiff of which from his garments is now 
and then as pleasant, I am willing to believe, as the 
[ 138 ] 



BOSTON THE LECTURE CRADLE 

scent of the lavender in which fair linen has been 
laid away in old bureau drawers. It is not the fra- 
grance of the garden, but there is something which 
reaches the memory in it and sets us thinking of 
seasons that are dead and gone, and what they 
carried away with them. 

I am a little overwhelmed with my new reputation 
as a gardener; yet as I have succeeded in raising as 
many cauliflowers and cabbages that did not head, as 
many rat-tailed carrots and ram's-horn radishes, in 
our Cambridge sand-patch, which we called a gar- 
den, as any other horticulturist could show from the 
same surface of ground, I have some claim to the title. 

I see some of the London journals have been at- 
tacking some of their literary people for lecturing, 
on the ground of its being a public exhibition of 
themselves for money. ... To this I reply . . . Her 
most Gracious Majesty, the Queen, exhibits her- 
self to the public as a part of the service for which 
she is paid. We do not consider it low-bred in her 
to pronounce her own speech, and should prefer it 
so to hearing it from any other person, or reading 
it. His Grace and his Lordship exhibit themselves 
very often for popularity, and their houses every 
[ 139 ] 



DR. HOLMES'S BOSTON 

day for money. — No, if a man shows himseK 
other than he is, if he beUttles himself before an 
audience for hire, then he acts unworthily. But 
a true word, fresh from the lips of a true man, is 
worth paying for, at the rate of eight dollars a day, 
or even of fifty dollars a lecture. The taunt must 
be an outbreak of jealousy against the renowned 
authors who have the audacity to be also orators. 
The sub-lieutenants (of the press) stick a too popu- 
lar writer and speaker with an epithet in England, 
instead of with a rapier, as in France. — Poh ! 

The weather here is very cold and the spring 
puns are very backward. Early Joe Millers, though 
forced to be up by the 1st of April are like to yield 
but a poor crop. The art o' jokes don't flourish. I 
wish you to see that we are some punkins here 
in the Hub town, though you have the demirep- 
utation of making worse puns and more of them 
in your city than are made in any other habitable 
portion of the globe. 

All lecturers, all professors, all schoolmasters, 

have ruts and grooves in their minds into which 

their conversation is perpetually sliding. Did you 

never, in riding through the woods in a still June 

[ 140 1 



BOSTON THE LECTURE CRADLE 

evening, suddenly feel that you had passed into a 
warm stratum of air, and in a minute or two strike 
the chill layer of atmosphere beyond? Did you 
never, in cleaving the green waters of the Back 
Bay, — where the Provincial blue-noses are in the 
habit of beating the "Metropolitan" boat-clubs, — 
find yourself in a tepid streak, a narrow, local gulf- 
stream, a gratuitous warm-bath a little under- 
done, through which your glistening shoulders soon 
flashed, to bring you back to the cold realities of 
full-sea temperature ! 

Just so, in talking to any of the characters above 
referred to, one not unfrequently finds a sudden 
change in the style of the conversation. The lack- 
lustre eye, rayless as a Beacon street door-plate in 
August, all at once fills with light; the face flings 
itself wide open like the church-portals when the 
bride and bridegroom enter; the little man grows in 
stature before your eyes, like the small prisoner with 
hair on end, beloved yet dreaded in early childhood; 
you were talking with a dwarf and an imbecile, — 
you have a giant and a trumpet-tongued angel be- 
fore you ! Nothing but a streak out of a fifty-dollar 
lecture. As when, at some unlooked-for moment, 
the mighty fountain-column (on the Common) 
[ 141 1 



DR. HOLMES'S BOSTON 

springs into the air before the astonished passer-by, 

— silver-footed, diamond-crowned, rainbow-scarfed 

— from the bosom of that fair sheet, sacred to the 
hymns of quiet batrachians at home, and the epi- 
grams of a less amiable and less elevated order of 
reptilia in other latitudes. 

Tell me that old Homer did not roll his sightless 
eyeballs about with delight, as he thundered out 
these ringing syllables! It seems hard to think of 
his going around like a hand-organ man, with such 
music and such thoughts as his to earn his bread 
with. One can't help wishing that Mr. Pugh could 
have got him for a single lecture, at least, of the 
*' Star Course," or that he could have appeared in 
the Music Hall, " for this night only." 

The same line of anxious and conscientious effort 
which I saw not long since on the forehead of one 
of the sweetest and truest singers who has visited 
us; the same which is so striking on the masks of 
singing women painted upon the fagade of our great 
organ, — that Himalayan home of harmony which 
you are to see and then die, if you don't live where 
you can see and hear it often. Many deaths have 
happened in a neighboring large city from that well- 
[ 142 ] 



The Beacon Street Side of the Public Garden, in 1857, shouoing 
Dr. Holmes and Ralph Waldo Emerson in Conversation 



\WtJ. 



BOSTON THE LECTURE CRADLE 

known complaint Icterus Invidiosorum, after re- 
turning from a visit to the Music Hall. 

I don't like your chopped music any way. That 
woman — she had more sense in her little finger 
than forty medical societies — Florence Nightin- 
gale — says that the music you pour out is good 
for sick folks, and the music you pound out is n't. 

I have attended a large number of celebrations, 
commencements, banquets, soirees, and so forth, 
and done my best to help on a good many of them. 
In fact, I have become rather too well known in 
connection with "occasions," and it has cost me no 
little trouble. I believe there is no kind of occur- 
rence for which I have not been requested to con- 
tribute something in prose or verse. It is sometimes 
very hard to say no to the requests. If one is in the 
right mood when he or she writes an occasional 
poem, it seems as if nothing could have been easier. 
"Why, that piece run off jest like ile. I don't bul- 
lieve," the unlettered applicant says to himself, — 
"I don't buUieve it took him ten minutes to write 
them verses." The good people have no suspicion 
of how much a single line, a single expression, may 
cost its author. 

[ 143] 



DR. HOLMES'S BOSTON 
I cannot work many hours consecutively with- 
out deranging my whole circulating and caloric 
system. My feet are apt to get cold, my head hot, 
my muscles restless, and I feel as if I must get up 
and exercise in the open air. This is in the morning, 
and I very rarely allow myself to be detained in- 
doors later than twelve o'clock. After fifteen or 
twenty minutes' walking I begin to come right, and 
after two or three times as much as that I can go 
back to my desk for an hour or two. 

A new lecture is just like any other new tool. We 
use it for a while with pleasure. Then it blisters 
our hands, and we hate to touch it. By and by our 
hands get callous, and then we have no longer any 
sensitiveness about it. But if we give it up, the 
callouses disappear; and if we meddle with it again, 
we miss the novelty and get the blisters. The story 
is often quoted of Whitefield, that he said a sermon 
was good for nothing until it had been preached 
forty times. A lecture does n't begin to be old until 
it has passed its hundredth delivery; and some, I 
think, have doubled, if not quadrupled, that num- 
ber. These old lectures are a man's best commonly; 
they improve by age, also, — like the pipes, fiddles, 
[ 144 ] 



BOSTON THE LECTURE CRADLE 

and poems I told you of the other day. One learns 
to make the most of their strong points and to 
carry off their weak ones, — to take out the really 
good things which don't tell on the audience, and 
put in cheaper things that do. All this degrades 
him, of course, but it improves the lecture for gen- 
eral delivery. A thoroughly popular lecture ought 
to have nothing in it which five hundred people 
cannot all take in in a flash, just as it is uttered. 

I tell you the average intellect of five hundred 
persons, taken as they come, is not very high. It 
may be sound and safe, so far as it goes, but it is 
not very rapid or profound. A lecture ought to be 
something which all can understand, about some- 
thing which interests everybody. 

[In 1882 Dr. Holmes delivered his farewell address to 
the Medical School of Harvard University. In the 
course of his remarks he said :] 

There are three occasions upon which a human 
being has a right to consider himself as a centre of 
interest to those about him: when he is christened, 
when he is married, and when he is buried. Every 
one is the chief personage, the hero of his own bap- 
tism, his own wedding, and his own funeral. 
[ 145 ] 



DR. HOLMES'S BOSTON 
There are other occasions, less momentous, in 
which one may make more of himself than under 
ordinary circumstances he would think proper to 
do when he may talk about himself, and tell his 
own experiences, in fact, indulge in a more or less 
egotistic monologue without fear of reproach. 

I think I may claim that this is one of those occa- 
sions. I have delivered my last anatomical lecture 
and heard my class recite for the last time. They 
wish to hear from me again in a less scholastic mood 
than that in which they have known me. . . . 

This is the thirty-sixth Course of Lectures in 
which I have taken my place and performed my 
duties as Professor of Anatomy. For more than 
half of my term of office I gave instruction in Phy- 
siology, after the fashion of my predecessors and in 
the manner then generally prevalent in our schools, 
where the physiological laboratory was not a neces- 
sary part of the apparatus of instruction. It was 
with my hearty approval that the teaching of 
Physiology was constituted a separate department 
and made an independent Professorship. Before 
my time. Dr. Warren had taught Anatomy, Physi- 
ology, and Surgery in the same course of Lectures, 
lasting only three or four months. As the bounda- 
[ 146 ] 



BOSTON THE LECTURE CRADLE 

ries of science are enlarged, new divisions and sub- 
divisions of its territories become necessary. In the 
place of six Professors in 1847, when I first became 
a member of the Faculty, I count twelve upon the 
Catalogue before me, and I find the whole number 
engaged in the work of instruction in the Medical 
School amounts to no less than fifty. 

Since I began teaching in this school, the aspect 
of many branches of science has undergone a very 
remarkable transformation. Chemistry and Physi- 
ology are no longer what they were, as taught by 
the instructors of that time. We are looking for- 
ward to the synthesis of new organic compounds; 
our artificial madder is already in the market, and 
the indigo-raisers are now fearing that their crop 
will be supplanted by the manufactured article. In 
the living body we talk of fuel supplied and work 
done, in movement, in heat, just as if we were deal- 
ing with a machine of our own contrivance. A phy- 
siological laboratory of to-day is equipped with 
instruments of research of such ingenious contri- 
vance, such elaborate construction, that one might 
suppose himself in a workshop where some exquis- 
ite fabric was to be wrought, such as Queens love to 
wear, and Kings do not always love to pay for. They 
[ 147 ] 



DR. HOLMES'S BOSTON 

are indeed weaving a charmed web, for these are 
the looms from which comes the knowledge that 
clothes the nakedness of intellect. . . . 

I am afraid that it is a good plan to get rid of old 
Professors, and I am thankful to hear that there is 
a movement for making provision for those who 
are left in need when they lose their oflSces and 
their salaries. ... If I myself needed an apology 
for holding my oflSce so long, I should find it in the 
fact that human anatomy is much the same study 
that it was in the days of Vesalius and Fallopius, 
and that the greater part of my teaching was of 
such a nature that it could never become antiquated. 

Old theories, and old men who cling to them, 
must take themselves out of the way as the new 
generation with its fresh thoughts and altered hab- 
its of mind comes forward to take the place of that 
which is dying out. It is always the same story that 
old men tell to younger ones, some few of whom will 
in their turn repeat the tale, only with altered 
names to their children's children. 

I am grateful to the roof which has sheltered me, 
and to the floors which have sustained me, though 
I have thought it safest always to abstain from any- 
[ 148 ] 



BOSTON THE LECTURE CRADLE 

thing like eloquence, lest a burst of too emphatic 
applause might land my class and myself in the cel- 
lar of the collapsing structure and bury us in the 
fate of Korah, Dathan, and Abiram. I have helped 
to wear these stairs into hollows, — stairs which I 
trod when they were smooth and level, fresh from 
the plane. There are just thirty -two of them, as 
there were five and thirty years ago, but they are 
steeper and harder to climb, it seems to me, than 
they were then. ... I have never been proud of the 
apartment beneath the seats, in which my prepara- 
tions for lecture were made. But I chose it because 
I could have it to myself, and I resign it, with a 
wish that it were more worthy of regret, into the 
hands of my successor, with my parting benediction. 
Within its twilight precincts I have often prayed 
for light, like Ajax, for the daylight found scanty 
entrance, and the gaslight never illuminated its 
dark recesses. May it prove to him who comes after 
me like the cave of the Sibyl, out of the gloomy 
depths of which came the oracles which shone with 
the rays of truth and wisdom. 

This temple of learning is not surrounded by the 
mansions of the great and wealthy. No stately 
avenues lead up to its f agades and portico. I have 
[ 149 ] 



DR. HOLMES'S BOSTON 

sometimes felt, when conveying a distinguished 
stranger through its precincts to its door, that he 
might question whether star-eyed science had not 
missed her way when she found herself in this not 
too attractive locality. I cannot regret that we — 
you, I should say — are soon to migrate to a more 
favored region, and carry on your work as teachers 
and learners in ampler halls and under far more 
favorable conditions. 

I dare not be a coward with my lips 

Who dare to question all things in my soul; 

Some men may find their wisdom on their knees, 

Some prone and grovelling in the dust like slaves; 

Let the meek glowworm glisten in the dew; 

I ask to lift my taper to the sky 

As they who hold their lamps above their heads, 

Trusting the larger currents up aloft, 

My life shall be a challenge, not a truce! 
This is my homage to the mighty powers. 
To ask my noblest question, undismayed 
By muttered threats that some hysteric sense 
Of wrong or insult will convulse the throne 
Where wisdom reigns supreme; . . . 

Thou will not hold in scorn the child who dares 
Look up to Thee, the Father, — dares to ask 
More than thy wisdom answers. 



CHAPTER VIII 
BOSTON THE BOOKISH 



If all the trees in all the woods were men; 

And each and every blade of grass a pen; 

If every leaf on every shrub and tree 

Turned to a sheet of foolscap; every sea 

Were changed to ink, and all earth's living tribes 

Had nothing else to do but act as scribes, 

And for ten thousand ages, day and night. 

The human race should write, and write, and write, 

Till all the pens and paper were used up. 

And the huge inkstand was an empty cup, 

Still would the scribblers clustered round its brink 

Call for more pens, more paper, and more ink. 



CHAPTER VIII 

B05T0X THE BOOKISH 

[Db, Holmes worked entlmsiastically for the founda- 
tion of the Harv-ard Medical Library, and he lived to 
see the new Boston Public Libraiy- rise upon its site in 
Copley Square; he dehvered a poem upon the occasion 
of the la\-ing of the comer-stone of the new edifice, in 
1S88.] 

A LTBR-iET Hke ours must exercise the largest 
hospitality. A great many books may be found in 
even' large collection which remind us of those 
apostolic-looking old men who figure on the plat- 
form at out political and other assemblages. 
Some of them have spoken words of wisdom in their 
day, but they have ceased to be oracles; some of 
them never had any particularly important mes- 
sage for humanity, but they add dignity to the 
meeting by their presence; they look wise, whether 
they are so or not, and no one grudges them their 
places of honor. 

I hke books, — I was bom and bred among them, 
and have the easy feeling, when I get into their 
presence, that a stable boy has among horses. I 
[ 153] 



DR. HOLMES'S BOSTON 

don't think I undervalue them, either as compan- 
ions or instructors. 

I read few books through. I remember writing on 
the last page of one that I had successfully mastered, 
perlegiy with the sense that it was a great triumph 
to have read quite through a volume of such size. 
But I have always read in books rather than through 
them, and always with more profit from the books 
I read in than the books I read through; for when I 
set out to read through a book, I always felt that I 
had a task before me, but when I read in a book it 
was the page or paragraph that I wanted, and 
which left its impression and became part of my 
intellectual furniture. 

Some day I want to talk about my library. It is 
such a curious collection of old and new books, such 
a mosaic of learning and fancies and follies, that a 
glance over it would interest the company. 

I have a picture hanging in my Hbrary, a litho- 
graph, of which many of my readers may have seen 
copies. It represents a grayhaired old book-lover 
at the top of a long flight of steps. He finds himself 
in clover, so to speak, among rare old editions, books 
[ 154] 



BOSTON THE BOOKISH 
he has longed to look upon and never seen before, 
rarities, precious old volumes, incunabula, cradle- 
books, printed while the art was in its infancy, — 
its glorious infancy, for it was born a giant. The 
old bookworm is so intoxicated with the sight and 
handling of the priceless treasures that he cannot 
bear to put one of the volumes back after he has 
taken them from the shelf. So there he stands, — 
one book open in his hands, a volume under each 
arm, and one or more between his legs, — loaded 
with as many as he can possibly hold at the same 
time. 

Now, that is just the way in which the extreme 
form of book-hunger shows itself in the reader whose 
appetite has become over-developed. He wants to 
read so many books that he over-crams himself with 
the crude materials of know^ledge, which become 
knowledge only when the mental digestion has time 
to assimilate them. I never go into that famous 
"Corner Bookstore," and look over the new books 
in the row before me, as I enter the door, without 
seeing half a dozen which I want to read, or at least 
know something about. 

"Well, then, there is no use in gorging one's self 
with knowledge, and no need of self-reproach be- 
l 155 1 



DR. HOLMES'S BOSTON 

cause one is content to remain more or less ignorant 
of many things which interest his fellow-creatures. 
We gain a good deal of knowledge through the 
atmosphere; we learn a great deal by accidental 
hearsay, provided we have the mordant in our own 
consciousness which makes the wise remark, the 
significant fact, the instructive incident take hold 
of it. After the stage of despair comes the period of 
consolation. We soon find that we are not so much 
worse off than most of our neighbors as we supposed. 
One of the encouraging signs of the times is the 
condensed and abbreviated form in which knowl- 
edge is presented to the general reader. The short 
biographies of historic personages, of which within 
the past few years many have appeared, have been 
a great relief to the large class of readers who want 
to know something, but not too much, about them. 

I have some curious books in my library, a few 
of which I should like to say something about. . . . 
A library of a few thousand volumes ought always 
to have some books in it which the owner almost 
never opens, yet with whose backs he is so well ac- 
quainted that he feels as if he knew something of 
their contents. They are like those persons whom 
[ 156 1 



Park Street from the State-House Grounds 



BOSTON THE BOOKISH 

we meet in our daily walks, with whose faces and 
figures, whose summer and winter garments, — 
whose walking-sticks and umbrellas even, — we feel 
acquainted, and yet whose names, whose business, 
whose residences, we know nothing about. Some of 
these books are so formidable in their dimensions, 
so rusty and crabbed in their aspect, that it takes 
a considerable amount of courage to attack them. 

Some books are edifices, to stand as they are 
built; some are hewn stones, ready to form a part 
of future edifices; some are quarries, from which 
stones are to be split for shaping and after use. 

I confess that I am not in sympathy with some of 
the movements that accompany the manifestations 
of American social and literary independence. . . . 
So far as concerns literary independence, if we 
understand by that getting rid of our subjection to 
British critisicm, such as it was in the days when 
the question was asked, "Who reads an American 
book.^^" we may consider it pretty well established. 
If it means dispensing with punctuation, coining 
words at will, self-revelation unrestrained by a 
sense of what is decorous, declamations in which 
[ 157 ] 



DR. HOLMES'S BOSTON 

everything is glorified without being ideaHzed, 
"poetry" in which the reader must make the 
rhythms which the poet has not made for him, then 
I think we had better continue hterary colonists. . . . 
But there is room for everybody and everything in 
our huge hemisphere. YoungAmerica is like a three- 
year-old colt with his saddle and bridle just taken 
off. The first thing he wants to do is to roll. He is a 
droll object, sprawling in the grass with his four 
hoofs in the air; but he likes it, and it won't harm 
us. So let him roll, — let him roll! 

I have always believed in life rather than books. 
I suppose every day of earth, with its hundred 
thousand deaths and something more of births, with 
its loves and hates, its triumphs and defeats, its 
pangs and blisses, has more of humanity in it than 
all the books that were ever written or put to- 
gether. I believe the flowers growing at this mo- 
ment send up more fragrance to heaven than was 
ever exhaled from all the essences ever distilled. 

Anybody can write "poetry." It is a most un- 
enviable distinction to have published a thin vol- 
ume of verse, which nobody wanted, nobody buys, 

[ 158 1 



BOSTON THE BOOKISH 

nobody reads, nobody cares for except the author, 
who cries over its pathos, poor fellow, and revels in 
its beauties, which he has all to himseK. Come! who 
will be my pupils in a Course, — Poetry taught in 
twelve lessons? 

Yes, write, if you want to, there 's nothing like trying; 

Who knows what a treasure your casket may hold? 
I '11 show you that rhyming 's as easy as lying. 

If you '11 listen to me while the art I unfold. 

Here 's a book full of words; one can choose as he fancies, 
As a painter his tint, as a workman his tool; 

Just think ! all the poems and plays and romances 
Were drawn out of this, like the fish from a pool! 

Just so with your verse, — 't is as easy as sketching, — 
You can reel off a song without knitting your brow, 

As lightly as Rembrandt a drawing or etching; 
It is nothing at all, if you only know how. 

Poetry is commonly thought to be the language 
of emotion. On the contrary, most of what is so 
called proves the absence of all passionate excite- 
ment. It is a cold-blooded, haggard, anxious, wor- 
rying hunt after rhymes which can be made service- 
able, after images which will be effective, after 
phrases which are sonorous; all this under limita- 
tions which restrict the natural movements of 
fancy and imagination. 

[ 159 ] 



DR. HOLMES'S BOSTON 

For the last thirty years I have been in the habit 
of receiving a volume of poems or a poem, printed 
or manuscript — I will not say daily, though I 
sometimes receive more than one a day, but at very 
short intervals. I have been consulted by hundreds 
of writers of verse as to the merit of their perform- 
ances, and have often advised the writers to the 
best of my ability. Of late I have found it impos- 
sible to attempt to read critically all the literary 
productions, in verse and prose, which have heaped 
themselves on every exposed surface of my library, 
like snowdrifts along the railroad tracks, — block- 
ing my literary pathway, so that I can hardly find 
my daily papers. 

I have read recently that Mr. Gladstone receives 
six hundred letters a day. Perhaps he does not re- 
ceive six hundred letters every day, but if he gets 
anything like that number daily, what can he do 
with them.? . . . 

I do not pretend that I receive six hundred or even 
sixty letters a day, but I do receive a good many, 
and have told the public of the fact from time to 
time, under the pressure of their constantly in- 
creasing exactions. As it is extremely onerous, and 
is soon going to be impossible, for me to keep up the 
[ 160] 



BOSTON THE BOOKISH 

wide range of correspondence which has become a 
large part of my occupation, and tends to absorb all 
the vital force which is left me, I wish to enter into 
a final explanation with the well-meaning but merci- 
less taskmasters who have now for many years been 
levying their heavy task upon me. I have preserved 
thousands of their letters, and destroyed a very 
large number, after answering them. . . . 

What struggles of young ambition, finding no 
place for its energies, or feeling its incapacity to 
reach the ideal towards which it was striving! What 
longings of disappointed, defeated fellow-mortals, 
trying to find a new home for themselves in the 
heart of one whom they have amiably idealized! 
And oh, what hopeless efforts of mediocrities and 
inferiorities, believing in themselves as superiorities, 
and stumbling on through limping disappointments 
to prostrate failure! Poverty comes pleading, not 
for charity, for the most part, but imploring us to 
find a purchaser for its unmarketable wares. The 
unreadable author particularly requests us to make a 
critical examination of his book, and report to him 
whatever may be our verdict, — as if he wanted 
anything but our praise, and that very often to be 
used in his publisher's advertisements. 
[ 161 ] 



DR. HOLMES'S BOSTON 

But what does not one have to submit to who has 
become the martyr — the Saint Sebastian — of a 
hterary correspondence! 

If the time ever comes when to answer all my 
kind unknown friends, even by dictation, is impos- 
sible, or more than I feel equal to, I wish to refer 
any of those who may feel disappointed at not re- 
ceiving an answer to the following general acknowl- 
edgments : — 

1. I am always grateful for any attention which 
shows me I am kindly remembered. 

2. Your pleasant message has been read to me, 
and has been thankfully listened to. 

3. Your book (your essay) (your poem) has 
reached me safely, and has received all the respect- 
ful attention to which it seemed entitled. It would 
take more than all the time I have at my disposal to 
read all the printed matter and all the manuscripts 
which are sent to me, and you would not ask me to 
attempt the impossible. You will not, therefore, 
expect me to express a critical opinion of your work. 

4. I am deeply sensible of your expressions of per- 
sonal attachment to me as an author of certain writ- 
ings which have brought me very near to you, — 
in virtue of some affinity in our ways of thought and 

[ 162 ] 



BOSTON THE BOOKISH 

moods of feeling. Although I cannot keep up the 
correspondences with many of my readers who seem 
to be thoroughly congenial with myself, let them be 
assured that their letters have been read or heard 
with peculiar gratification, and are preserved as 
precious treasures. 

What a blessed thing it is, that Nature, when she 
invented, manufactured and patented her authors, 
contrived to make critics out of the chips that were 
left ! Painful as the task is, they never fail to warn 
the author, in the most impressive manner, of the 
probabilities of failure in what he has undertaken. 
Sad as the necessity is to their delicate sensibilities, 
they never hesitate to advise him of the decline of 
his powers, and to press upon him the propriety of 
retiring before he sinks into imbecility. 

No more our foolish passions and affections 
The tragic Muse with mimic grief shall try, 

But, nobler far, a course of vivisections 

Teach what it costs a tortured brute to die. 

Instead of crack-brained poets in their attics 
Filling thin volumes with their flowery talk. 

There shall be books of wholesome mathematics; 
The tutor with his blackboard and his chalk. 

[ 163 1 



DR. HOLMES'S BOSTON 

No longer bards with madrigal and sonnet 

Shall woo to moonlight walks the ribboned sex. 

But side by side the beaver and the bonnet 
Stroll, calmly pondering on some problem's x. 

The sober bliss of serious calculation 

Shall mock the trivial joys that fancy drew, 

And, oh, the rapture of a solved equation, — 
One selfsame answer on the lips of two ! 

It seems to me, I said, that the great additions 
which have been made by realism to the territory 
of literature consist largely in swampy, malarious, 
ill-smelling patches of soil which had previously 
been left to reptiles and vermin. It is perfectly easy 
to be original by violating the laws of decency and 
the canons of good taste. The general consent of 
civilized people was supposed to have banished cer- 
tain subjects from the conversation of well-bred peo- 
ple and the pages of respectable literature. There 
is no subject, or hardly any, which may not be 
treated of at the proper time, in the proper place, 
by the fitting person, for the right kind of listener 
or reader. But when the poet or the story-teller 
invades the province of the man of science, he is on 
dangerous ground. I need say nothing of the blun- 
ders he is pretty sure to make. The imaginative 
[ 164 ] 



BOSTON THE BOOKISH 

writer is after effects. The scientific man is after 
truth. Science is decent, modest; does not try to 
startle, but to instruct. The same scenes and ob- 
jects which outrage every sense of delicacy in the 
story-teller's highly colored paragraphs can be read 
without giving offense in the chaste language of the 
physiologist or the physician. In this matter of the 
literal reproduction of sights and scenes which our 
natural instinct and our better informed taste and 
judgment teach us to avoid, art has been far in ad- 
vance of literature. 

Who does not remember odious images that can 
never be washed out from the consciousness which 
they have stained.'^ . . . Expressions and thoughts 
of a certain character stain the fibre of the thinking 
organ, and in some degree affect the hue of every 
idea that passes through the discolored tissues. 

This puerile hunting after details, this cold and 
cynical inventory of all the wretched conditions in 
the midst of which poor humanity vegetates, not 
only do not help us to understand it better, but, on 
the contrary, the effect on the spectators is a kind 
of dazzled confusion mingled with fatigue and dis- 
gust. . . . Truth is lost in its own excess. 

I confess that I am a little jealous of certain ten- 
[ 165 ] 



DR. HOLMES'S BOSTON 

dencies in our own American literature, which led 
one of the severest and most outspoken of our sa- 
tirical fellow-countrymen, no longer living to be 
called to account for it, to say, in a moment of bit- 
terness, that the mission of America was to vulgar- 
ize mankind. 

Our American atmosphere is vocal with the flip- 
pant loquacity of half knowledge. We must accept 
whatever good can be got out of it, and keep it under 
as we do sorrel and mullein and witchgrass, by en- 
riching the soil, and sowing good seed in plenty; by 
good teaching and good books, rather than by wast- 
ing our time in talking against it. Half knowledge 
dreads nothing but whole knowledge. 

The difference between green and seasoned knowl- 
edge is very great. 

What glorifies a town like a cathedral.^ What dig- 
nifies a province hkea university? What illumines 
a country like its scholarship, and what is the nest 
that hatches scholars but a library? 

Thus, then, our library is a temple as truly as the 
dome-crowned cathedral hallowed by the breath of 
prayer and praise, where the dead repose and the 
[ 166] 



The Museum of Fine Arts, Copley Square 



BOSTON THE BOOKISH 
living worship. May all its treasures be consecrated 
like that to the glory of God, through the contribu- 
tions it shall make to the advancement of sound 
knowledge . . . and to the common cause in which 
all good men are working, the furtherance of the 
well-being of their fellow-creatures ! 

Proudly, beneath her glittering dome, 
Our three-hilled city greets the morn; 

Here Freedom fomid her virgin home, — 
The Bethlehem where her babe was bom. 

Let in the hght! from every age 

Some gleams of garnered wisdom pour. 

And, fixed on thought's electric page, 
Wait all their radiance to restore. 

Let in the light! these windowed walls 
Shall brook no shadowing colonnades, 

But day shall flood the silent halls 
Till o'er yon hills the sunset fades. 

Behind the ever open gate 

No pikes shall fence a crumbling throne,' 
No lackeys cringe, no courtiers wait, — 

This palace is the people's own! 

Here shall the sceptred mistress reign 
Who heeds her meanest subject's call. 

Sovereign of all their vast domain, 
The queen, the handmaid of them all! 



CHAPTER IX 
BOSTON ELMS AND THE LONG PATH 



The elms have robed their slender spray 
With full-blown flower and embryo leaf; 

Wide o'er the clasping arch of day 
Soars Uke a cloud their hoary chief. 

See the proud tulip's flaunting cup. 
That flames in glory for an hour, — 

Behold it withering, — then look up, — 
How meek the forest monarch's flower! 

When wake the violets. Winter dies; 

When sprout the elm-buds. Spring is near; 
When lilacs blossom, Summer cries, 
"Bud, httle roses! Spring is here!" 



CHAPTER IX 

BOSTON ELMS AND THE LONG PATH 

[Dr. Holmes cherished a lifelong enthusiasm for 
trees, and while on his lecture tours about the country, 
he was wont to carry in his pocket a measuring tape, 
which he stretched about the girth of any especial tree 
giant that he encountered. During his travels abroad, 
he delighted to compare the measurements of the great 
trees in foreign countries with those of his own land, 
and he was keenly elated when his "home trees" proved 
winners in the contest of dimension.] 

It has always been a favorite idea of mine to 
bring the life of the Old and the New World face 
to face by an accurate comparison of their various 
types of organization. We should begin with man, 
of course; institute a large and exact comparison 
between the development of la pianta umana, as 
Alfieri called it, in different sections of each country, 
in the different callings, at different ages, estimat- 
ing the height, weight, force by the dynamometer 
and the spirometer, and finishing off with a series 
of typical photographs, giving the principal na- 
tional physiognomies. Then I would follow this up 
[ 171] 



DR. HOLMES'S BOSTON 

by contrasting the various parallel forms of life in 
the two continents. . . . The American elm is tall, 
graceful, slender-sprayed, and drooping as if from 
languor. The EngHsh elm is compact, robust, holds 
its branches up, and carries its leaves for weeks 
longer than our own native tree. 

Is this typical of the creative force on the two 
sides of the ocean, or not? 

The most interesting comparison I made was 
between the New England and the Old England 
elms. It is not necessary to cross the ocean to do 
this, as we have both varieties growing side by side 
in our parks, — on Boston Common, for instance. 
It is wonderful to note how people will he about 
big trees. There must be as many as a dozen trees, 
each of which calls itself the "largest elm in New 
England." In my younger days, when I never 
travelled without a measuring tape in my pocket, 
it amused me to see how meek one of the great 
swaggering elms would look when it saw the fatal 
measure begin to unreel itself. It seemed to me that 
the leaves actually trembled as the inexorable band 
encircled the trunk in the smallest place it could find, 
which is the only safe rule. The EngHsh elm {Ulmus 
[ 172] 



Tremont Street Mall, nou- called Lafayette Mall, Boston Common 



nouMwOi «6j«ba , ,ibU »tt'4i(!^nil fcUl^■ ^ivH .IWW ■ i^fo^j iWr, 



BOSTON ELMS 

campestris) as we see it in Boston, comes out a little 
earlier, perhaps, than our own, but the difference 
is slight. It holds its leaves long after oiu- elms are 
bare. It grows upward, with abundant dark foli- 
age, while ours spreads, sometimes a hundred and 
twenty feet, and often droops like a weeping willow. 
The English elm looks like a much more robust tree 
than ours, yet they tell me it is very fragile, and 
that its limbs are constantly breaking off in high 
winds, just as happens with our native elms. Ours 
is not a very' long-lived tree; between two and 
three hundred years is, I think, the longest life that 
can be hoped for it. 

There is a hint of a tj-pical difference in the Amer- 
ican and the Englishman which I have long recog- 
nized in the two elms as compared to each other. 
It may be fanciful, but I have thought that the 
correctness and robustness about the Enghsh elm, 
which are replaced by the long tapering Hmbs and 
willow^' grace and far-spreading reach of our own, 
might find a certain parallelism in the people, es- 
pecially the females of the two countries. 

I saw no horse-chestnuts equal to those I re- 
member in Salem, and especially to one in Rock- 
port, which is the largest and finest I have ever seen; 
[ 173 1 



DR. HOLMES'S BOSTON 

no willows like those I pass in my daily drives. . . . 
No apple-trees I saw in England compare with one 
next my own door, and there are many others as 
fine in the neighborhood. 

I saw the poet [Tennyson] to the best advantage, 
under his own trees and walking over his own do- 
main. He took delight in pointing out to me the 
finest and rarest of his trees, — and there were 
many beauties among them. I recalled my morn- 
ing's visit to Whittier at Oak Knoll, in Danvers, a 
little more than a year ago, when he led me to one 
of his favorites, an aspiring evergreen which shot 
up like a flame. I thought of the graceful Ameri- 
can elms in front of Longfellow's house, and the 
sturdy English elms that stand in front of Lowell's. 
In this garden of England, the Isle of Wight, where 
everything grows with such a lavish extravagance 
of greenness that it seems as if it must bankrupt 
the soil before autumn, I felt as if weary eyes and 
overtasked brains might reach their happiest haven 
of rest. . . . We find our most soothing companion- 
ship in the trees among which we have lived, some 
of which we may ourselves have planted. We lean 
against them, and they never betray our trust; 
r 174 1 



BOSTON ELMS 

they shield us from the sun and from the rain; their 
spring welcome is a new birth, which never loses its 
freshness; they lay their beautiful robes at our feet 
in autumn; in winter they "stand and wait," em- 
blems of patience and of truth, for they hide noth- 
ing, not even the Httle leaf-buds which hint to 
us of hope, the last element in their triple sym- 
bolism. 

I have owned many beautiful trees, and loved 
many more outside my own leafy harem. Those 
who write verses have no special claim to be lovers 
of trees, but so far as one is of the poetical tempera- 
ment he is likely to be a tree-lover. Poets have, as 
a rule, more than the average nervous sensibility 
and irritability. Trees have no nerves. They live and 
die without suffering, without self-questioning or 
self-reproach. They have the divine gift of silence. 
They cannot obtrude upon the solitary moments 
when one is to himself the most agreeable of com- 
panions. 

The poet is a luxury, and if you want him you 
must pay for him, by not trying to make a drudge 
of him, while he is all his lifetime struggling with 
the chills and heats of his artistic intermittent 
fever. 

[175] 



DR. HOLMES'S BOSTON 

Say not the Poet dies ! 

Though in the dust he lies, 
He cannot forfeit his melodious breath, 

TJnsphered by envious death! 
Life drops the voiceless myriads from its roll; 

Their fate he cannot share. 

Who, in the enchanted air 
Sweet with the lingering strains that Echo stole, 
Has left his dearer self, the music of his soul! 

Count not our Poet dead ! 

The stars shall watch his bed. 
The rose of June its fragrant Uf e renew 

His blushing mound to strew. 
And all the tuneful throats of summer swell 

With trills as crystal-clear 

As when he wooed the ear 
Of the young muse that haunts each wooded dell. 
With songs of that "rough land" he loved so long and well! 

He sleeps; he cannot die! 

As evening's long-drawn sigh, 
Lifting the rose-leaves on his peaceful mound. 

Spreads all their sweets around. 
So, laden with his song, the breezes blow 

From where the rustling sedge 

Frets our rude ocean's edge 
To the smooth sea beyond the peaks of snow. 
His soul the air enshrines and leaves but dust below! 

A walk through the grounds of Magdalen College, 
under the guidance of the president of that college, 
[ 176] 



BOSTON ELMS 

showed us some of the fine trees for which I was 
always looking. One of these, a wych-elm (Scotch 
elm of some books), was so large that I insisted 
upon having it measured. A string was procured 
and carefully carried round the trunk, above the 
spread of the roots and below that of the branches, 
so as to give the smallest circumference. I was cu- 
rious to know how the size of the trunk of this tree 
would compare with that of the trunks of some of 
our largest New England elms. 

I have measured a good many of these. About 
sixteen feet is the measurement of a large elm, like 
that on Boston Common, which all middle-aged 
people remember. From twenty-two to twenty- 
three feet is the ordinary maximum of the very larg- 
est trees. I never found but one to exceed it: that 
was the great Springfield elm, which looked as if it 
might have been formed by the coalescence, from 
the earliest period of growth, of two young trees. 
When I measured this in 1837, it was twenty -four 
feet eight inches in circumference at five feet from 
the ground; growing larger above and below. I re- 
member this tree well, as we measured the string 
that was to tell the size of its English rival. As we 
came near the end of the string, I felt as I did when 
[ 177 1 



DR. HOLMES'S BOSTON 

I was looking at the last dash of Ormonde and the 
Bard of Epsom. — Twenty feet, and a long piece 
of string left. — Twenty-one. — Twenty-two. — 
Twenty-three. — An extra heart-beat or two. — 
Twenty-four! Twenty-five and six inches over!! 
The Springfield elm may have grown a foot or 
more since I measured it, fifty years ago, but the 
tree at Magdalen stands ahead of all my old meas- 
urements. Many of the fine old trees, this in par- 
ticular, may have been known in their younger 
days to Addison, whose favorite walk is still 
pointed out to the visitor. 

I never saw more than two or three good photo- 
graphs of American elms. The best is a large one 
of the *' Johnson Elm" about three miles from Prov- 
idence, one of the finest trees, as it was when I used 
to visit it in New England. This was sent me, 
framed by my nephew Dr. Parsons, of Providence, 
who may be in possession of the negative. ... I 
have stereographs of the Boston Elm, before its 
present condition of decadence, and one of the 
Washington Elm, the last a fair specimen of the 
tree, but neither of them equal to the great John- 
son Elm. 

[ 178] 



BOSTON ELMS 

I have brought down a slice of hemlock to show 
you. Tree blew down in my woods (that were) in 
1852. Twelve feet and a half round, fair girth; nine 
feet where I got my section, higher up. This is a 
wedge, going to the centre, of the general shape of a 
slice of apple-pie in a large and not opulent family. 
Length about eighteen inches. I have studied the 
growth of this tree by its rings, and it is curious. 
Three hundred and forty -two rings. Started, there- 
fore, about 1510. The thickness of the rings tells 
the rate at which it grew. Look here. Here are 
some human lives laid down against the periods of 
its growth, to which they corresponded. This is 
Shakespeare's. The tree was seven inches in diam- 
eter when he was born; ten inches when he died. A 
little less than ten inches when Milton was born; 
seventeen when he died. Then comes a long inter- 
val, and this thread marks out Johnson's life, dur- 
ing which the tree increased from twenty-two to 
twenty-nine inches in diameter. Here is the span of 
Napoleon's career, — the tree does n't seem to have 
minded it. 

I never saw the man who was not startled at 
looking on this section, — I have seen many wooden 
preachers, — never one Hke this. How much more 
[ 179 ] 



DR. HOLMES'S BOSTON 

striking would be the calendar counted on the rings 
of one of these awful trees which were standing 
when Christ was on earth, and where that brief 
mortal life is chronicled with the stoUd apathy of 
vegetable being, which remembers all human his- 
tory as a thing of yesterday in its own dateless ex- 
istance ! 

What makes a first-class elm? — Why size, in 
the first place, and chiefly. Anything over twenty 
feet of clear girth, five feet above the ground, and 
with a spread of branches a hundred feet across, 
may claim that title, according to my scale. 

Elms of the second-class, generally ranging from 
fourteen to eighteen feet, are comparatively com- 
mon. The queen of them all is that glorious tree 
near one of the churches in Springfield. Beautiful 
and stately she is beyond all praise. The "great 
tree " on Boston Common comes in the second rank, 
as does the one at Cohasset, which used to have, 
and probably has still a head as round as an apple, 
and near them one at Newburyport, with scores 
of others which might be mentioned. 

Eternal Truth ! beyond our hopes and fears 
Sweep the vast orbits of thy myriad spheres! 

\ 180 1 



BOSTON ELMS 

From age to age, while History carves sublime 
On her waste rock the flaming curves of time. 
How the wild swayings of our planet show 
That worlds unseen surround the world we know. 

There was no place so favorable as the Common 
for the study of the heavens. The skies were bril- 
liant with stars, and the air was just keen enough 
to remind our young friend that the cold season 
was at hand. They wandered round for a while, 
and at last found themselves under the Great Elm, 
drawn hither, no doubt, by the magnetism it is so 
well known to exert over the natives of its own soil 
and those who have often been under the shadow of 
its outstretched arms. 

The venerable survivor of its contemporaries 
that flourished in the days when Blacks tone rode 
beneath it on his bull, was now a good deal broken 
by age, yet not without marks of lusty vitality. It 
has been wrenched and twisted and battered by so 
many scores of winters that some of its limbs were 
crippled and many of its joints were shaky, and but 
for the support of the iron braces that lent their 
strong sinews to its more infirm members it would 
have gone to pieces in the first strenuous north- 
easter or the first sudden and violent gale from the 
[ 181 ] 



DR. HOLMES'S BOSTON 

southwest. But there it stood . . . though its obit- 
uary was long ago written after one of the ter- 
rible storms that tore its branches, — leafing out 
hopefully in April as if it were trying in its dumb 
language to lisp "Our Father," and dropping its 
slender burden of foliage in October as softly as if 
it were whispering Amen! 

Not far from the ancient and monumental tree 
lay a small sheet of water, once agile with life and 
vocal with evening melodies, but now stirred only 
by the swallow as he dips his wing, or by the morn- 
ing bath of the English sparrows, those high-headed, 
thick-bodied, full-feeding, hot-tempered little John 
Bulls that keep up such a swashing and swabbing 
and spattering round all the water basins, one 
might think from the fuss they make about it that a 
bird never took a bath here before, and that they 
were the missionaries of ablution to the unwashed 
Western world. 

There are those who speak lightly of this small 
aqueous expanse, the eye of the sacred enclosure, 
which has looked unwinking on the happy faces of 
so many natives and the curious features of so 
many strangers. The music of its twilight minstrels 
has long ceased, but their memory lingers like an 
[ 182 1 



The Old Elm, Boston Common 



BOSTON ELMS 
echo in the name it bears. Cherish it, inhabitants 
of the two-hilled city, once three-hilled; ye who 
have said to the mountain "Remove hence," and 
turned the sea into dry land! May no contractor 
fill his pockets by undertaking to fill thee, thou 
granite-girdled lakelet, or drain the civic purse by 
drawing off thy waters ! For art thou not the Palla- 
dium of our Troy? Didst thou not, like the Divine 
image which was the safeguard of Ilium, fall from 
the skies, and if the Trojan could look with pride 
upon the heaven-descended form of the Goddess of 
Wisdom, cannot he who dwells by thy shining oval 
look in that mirror and contemplate Himself, — 
the Native of Boston? 

Will you walk out and look at those elms with 
me after breakfast? — I said to the schoolmistress. 

We walked under Mr, Paddock's row of English 
elms. The gray squirrels were looking for their 
breakfasts, and one of them came towards us in 
light, soft, intermittent leaps, until he was close to 
the rail of the burial-ground. He was on a grave 
with a broad blue-slatestone at its head, and a shrub 
growing on it. The stone said this was the grave 
of a young man who was the son of an Honorable 
[ 183 1 



DR. HOLMES'S BOSTON 

gentleman, who died a hundred years ago and more. 
Oh, yes, died^ — with a small triangular mark on 
one breast, and another smaller opposite, in his back, 
where another young man's rapier had slid through 
his body; and so he lay out there on the Common, 
and was found cold the next morning, with the night- 
dews and the death-dews mingled on his forehead. 

Let us have a look at poor Benjamin's grave, — 
said I. — His bones lie where his body was laid so 
long ago, and where the stone says they lie, — 
which is more than can be said of most of the ten- 
ants of this and several other burial-grounds. 

The most accursed act of Vandalism ever com- 
mitted within my knowledge was the uprooting of 
the ancient gravestones in three at least of our city 
burial-grounds, and one at least just outside the 
city, and planting them in rows to suit the taste for 
symmetry of the perpetrators. Many years ago, 
when this disgraceful process was going on under 
my eyes, I addressed an indignant remonstrance to 
a leading journal. I suppose it was deficient in lit- 
erary elegance, or too warm in its language; for no 
notice was taken of it, and the hyena horror was 
allowed to complete itself in the face of daylight. 
I have never got over it. 

[ 184 ] 



The Tremont House, 1886 



BOSTON ELMS 

The bones of my own ancestors, being entombed, 
lie beneath their own tablet; but the upright stones 
have been shuffled about like chessmen, and noth- 
ing short of the Day of Judgment will tell whose 
dust hes beneath any of those records, meant by 
affection to mark one small spot as sacred to some 
cherished memory. Shame! Shame! Shame! that 
is all I can say. It was on public thoroughfares, 
under the eye of authority, that this infamy was 
enacted. The red Indians would have known bet- 
ter; the selectmen of an African kraal-village would 
have had more respect for their ancestors. I should 
like to see the gravestones which have been dis- 
turbed all removed, and the ground levelled, leav- 
ing the flat tombstones; epitaphs were never famous 
for truth, but the old reproach of "Here lies" never 
had such a wholesale illustration as in these out- 
raged burial-places, where the stone does he above 
and the bones do not He beneath. 

Stop before we turn away, and breathe a woman's 
sigh over poor Benjamin's dust. Love killed him I 
think. Twenty years old, and there fighting another 
young fellow on the Common in the cool of that old 
July evening; yes, there must have been love at the 
bottom of it. 

[ 185 ] 



DR. HOLMES'S BOSTON 

The schoolmistress dropped a rosebud she had in 
her hand, through the rails, upon the grave of Ben- 
jamin Woodbridge. 

We came opposite the head of a place or court 
running eastward from the main street. — Look 
down there, — I said, — My friend, the Professor, 
lived in that house at the left hand for years and 
years. He died out of it, the other day. — Died.? — 
said the schoolmistress. — Certainly, — said I. We 
die out of houses, just as we die out of our bodies. 
A commercial smash kills a hundred men'shouses for 
them, as a railroad crash kills their mortal frames 
and drives out the immortal tenants. Men sicken of 
houses until at last they quit them, as the soul leaves 
its body when it is tired of its infirmities. The body 
has been called "the house we live in"; the house is 
quite as much the body we live in. 

The schoolmistress and I had pleasant walks and 
long talks. . . . 

My idea was, in the first place, to search out the 
picturesque spots which the city affords a sight of, 
to those who have eyes. I know a good many and it 
was a pleasure to look at them in company with my 
young friend. There were the shrubs and flowers in 
the Franklin-Place front-yards or borders: Com- 
[ 186 1 



The Long Path, Boston Common 



BOSTON ELMS 

merce is just putting his granite foot upon them. 
Then there are certain small seraglio-gardens, into 
which one can get a peep through the crevices of 
high fences, — one in Myrtle Street, or at the back 
of it, — here and there one at the North and South 
Ends. Then the great elms in Essex Street. Then 
the stately horsechestnuts in that vacant lot in 
Chambers Street, which hold their outspread hand 
over your head (as I said in my poem the other day), 
and look as if they were whispering, "May grace, 
mercy, and peace be with you!" — and the rest of 
the benediction. Nay, there are certain patches of 
ground, which, having lain neglected for a time. 
Nature, who always has her pockets full of seeds, 
and holes in her pockets, has covered with hungry 
plebeian growths, which fight for life with each 
other, imtil some of them get broad-leaved and suc- 
culent, and you have a coarse vegetable tapestry 
which Raphael would have disdained to spread over 
the foreground of his masterpiece. The Professor 
pretends that he found such a one on Charles Street, 
which, in its dare-devil impudence of rough-and- 
tumble vegetation, beat the pretty -behaved flower- 
beds of the Public Garden as ignominiously as a 
group of young tatterdemalions playing pitch-and- 
[ 187 1 



DR. HOLMES'S BOSTON 

toss beats a row of Sunday-school-boys with their 
teacher at their head. 

It was on the Common that we were walking. The 
mall, or boulevard of our Common, you know, has 
various branches leading from it in different direc- 
tions. One of these runs down opposite Joy Street 
southward across the whole length of the Common 
to Boylston Street. We called it the long path, and 
were fond of it. 

I felt very weak, indeed (though of a tolerably 
robust habit), as we came opposite the head of this 
path on that morning. I think I tried to speak 
twice without making myself distinctly audible. 
At last I got out the question, — Will you take the 
long path with me.^^ — Certainly, — said the school- 
mistress, — with much pleasure. — Think, — I said, 
before you answer: if you take the long path with 
me now, I shall interpret it that we are to part 
no more! The schoolmistress stepped back with a 
sudden movement, as if an arrow had struck her. 

One of the long granite blocks used as seats was 
hard by, the one you may still see close by the Ging- 
ko-tree. —Pray, sit down, — I said. — No, no, she an- 
swered softly, — I will walk the long path with you ! 



CHAPTER X 
FAREWELL. BOSTON 



I COME not here your morning hour to sadden, 
A limping pilgrim, leaning on his staff, — 
I, who have never deemed it sin to gladden 
This vale of sorrows with a wholesome laugh. 

If words of mine another's gloom has brightened, 
Through my dumb Hps the heaven-sent message came: 
If hand of mine another's task has lightened. 
It felt the guidance that it dares not claim. 

Time claims his tribute; silence now is golden; 

Let me not vex the too long suffering lyre; 

Though to your love untiring still beholden, 

The curfew tells me — cover up the fire. 

And now with grateful smile and accents cheerful. 

And warmer heart than look or word can tell, 

In simplest phrase — these traitorous eyes are tearful - 

Thanks, Brothers, Sisters, — Children, — and farewell. 



CHAPTER X 

FAREWELL, BOSTON 

[The Doctor glided gently and peacefully into the 
period of old age. He had worked hard but had never 
been forced to over- work; he had been free from any 
overwhelming anxieties; he had always enjoyed a com- 
fortable amount of worldly goods, and had been ever 
surrounded by congenial friends and agreeable family 
ties. In the words of his biographer: 

"He had strolled pleasantly and at his own pace along 
the side paths, by the enchanting hedgerows, quite 
apart from the hurly-burly of the highway where the 
throng hurried and jostled along, the millionaires and 
the beggars crowding, hustling, and cursing each other. 
Thus leaving this procession, which could find no leisure 
for enjoyment, to push and tumble along as best it 
might, he meantime advanced pleasantly falling in now 
and then with good company, moving through the 
changing shade, or sunshine, enjoying all the possible 
beauty and peacefulness of the journey through life. 
In this way he became old, and hardly knew it — 
would have forgotten it for a long while, perhaps, had 
he been a less close observer of facts, or if others had 
not called his attention to the climbing figures of the 
anniversaries."] 

I MUST not forget that a new generation of readers 
has come into being since I have been writing for 
[ 191 ] 



DR. HOLMES'S BOSTON 

the public, and that a new generation of aspiring 
and briUiant authors has grown into general recog- 
nition. The dome of Boston State House, which is 
the centre of my little universe was glittering in its 
fresh golden pellicle before I had reached the scrip- 
tural boundary of life. It has lost its lustre now, 
and the years which have dulled its surface have 
whitened the dome of that fragile structure in which 
my consciousness holds the session of its faculties. 
Time is not to be cheated. 

Look here! There are crowds of people whirled 
through our streets on these new-fashioned cars, with 
their witch-broomsticks overhead, — if they don't 
come from Salem, they ought to, — and not more 
than one in a dozen of these fish-eyed bipeds thinks 
or cares a nickel's worth about the miracle which is 
wrought for their convenience. . . . 'VMiat do they 
know or care about this last revelation of the omni- 
present spirit of the material universe? We ought 
to go down on our knees when one of these mighty 
caravans, car after car, spins by us, under the mys- 
tic impulse which seems to know not whether its 
train is loaded or empty. ... I am thankful that in 
an age of cjTiicism I have not lost my reverence. 
[ 192] 



FAREWELL, BOSTON 
Perhaps you would wonder to see how some very 
common sights impress me. . . . And now, before 
this new manifestation of that form of cosmic vital- 
ity which we call electricity, I feel like taking the 
posture of the peasants listening to the Angelus. 

All reflecting persons must recognize, in looking 
back over a long life, how largely their creeds, their 
course of life, their wisdom and unwisdom, their 
whole characters, were shaped by the conditions 
which surrounded them. Little children they came 
from the hands of the Father of all; Httle children in 
their helplessness, their ignorance, they are going 
back to him. They cannot help feeling that they 
are to be transferred from the rude embrace of the 
boisterous elements to arms that will receive them 
tenderly. Poor planetary foimdlings, they have 
known hard treatment at the hands of the brute 
forces of nature, from the control of which they are 
soon to be set free. 

I see no comer of the imiverse which the Father 

has wholly deserted. The forces of Xature bruise 

and wound our bodies, but an arteiy no sooner 

bleeds than the Di\Tne hand is placed upon it to 

"l 193 ] 



DR. HOLMES'S BOSTON 

stay the flow. A wound is no sooner made than the 
heaHng process is set on foot. Pain reaches a certain 
point and insensibihty comes on, — for fainting is 
the natural anodyne of curable briefs, as death is 
the remedy of those which are intolerable. 

I am satisfied, that, as we grow older, we learn 
to look upon our bodies more and more as a tempor- 
ary possession and less and less as identified with 
ourselves. In early years, while the child "feels its 
life in every limb," it lives in the body and for the 
body to a very great extent. It ought to be so. 

I am living as agreeably as possible under my con- 
ditions. . . . But in the mean time my sight grows 
dimmer, my hearing grows harder, and I don't 
doubt my mind grows duller. But you remember 
what Landor said : that he was losing his mind, but 
he did n't mind that, — he was losing or had lost 
his teeth — that was his chief affliction. Between 
nature and art I get on very well in the dental way, 
— as for the mental, I will not answer. 

Don't you stay at home of evenings? Don't you love a cush- 
ioned seat 

In a corner, by the fireside, with your slippers on your 
feet.? 

[ 194 1 



The Gardiner-Green House, Pemberton Square 



FAREWELL, BOSTON 

Don't you wear warm, fleecy flannels? Don't you muflSe up 

your throat? 
Don't you like to have one help you when you 're putting on 

your coat? 

Don't you Uke old books you've dog's-eared, you can't re- 
member when? 
Don't you call it late at nine o'clock and go to bed at ten? 
How many cronies can you count of all you used to know 
Who called you by yoiu* christian name some fifty years ago? 

An old tree can put forth a leaf as green as that 
of a young one, and looks at it with a pleasant sort 
of surprise, I suppose, as I do at my saucily juvenile 
productions. 

I think I do not feel any considerable change in 
my general condition, — my sight grows dimmer, of 
course, — but very slowly. I have worn the same 
glasses for twenty years. I am getting somewhat 
hard of hearing, — "slightly deaf," the newspapers 
inform me, with that polite attention to a personal 
infirmity which is characteristic of the newspaper 
press. The dismantling of the human organism is a 
gentle process, more obvious to those who look on 
than to those who are the subjects of it. It brings 
some solaces with it: deafness is a shield; incapacity 
unloads our shoulders; and imbecility, if it must 
come, is always preceded by the administration of 
[ 195 ] 



DR. HOLMES'S BOSTON 

one of Nature's opiates. It is a good deal that we 
older writers, whose names are often mentioned 
together, should have passed the Psalmist's limit 
of active life, and yet have an audience when we 
speak or sing. 

I wish you all the blessings you have asked for 
me — how much better you deserve them ! 

There is all the difference in the world in the men- 
tal as in the bodily constitution of different individ- 
uals. Some must "take in sail" sooner, some later. 
We can get a useful lesson from the American and 
English elms on our Common. The American elms 
are quite bare, and have been so for weeks. They 
know very well that they are going to have storms 
to wrestle Tvdth; they have not forgotten the gales of 
September and the tempests of the late autumn and 
early winter. It is a hard fight they are going to 
have, and they strip their coats off and roll up their 
shirt-sleeves, and show themselves bare-armed and 
ready for the contest. The EngUsh elms are of a 
more robust build, and stand defiant, with all their 
summer clothing about their sturdy frames. They 
niay yet have to learn a lesson from their American 
cousins, for notwithstanding their compact and 
[ 196 ] 



FAREWELL, BOSTON 

solid structure they go to pieces in the great vnnds 
just as ours do. We must drop much of our fohage 
before winter is upon us. We must take in sail and 
throw over cargo, if necessary, to keep us afloat. 

There are no times like the old times, — they shall never be 

forgot ! 
There is no place like the old place, — keep green the dear old 

spot! 
There are no friends Hke our old friends, — may Heaven 

prolong their lives! 
There are no loves Uke our old loves, — God bless our lo\Tng 

wives! 

At fifty, your vessel is staunch, and you are on 
deck with the rest, in all weathers. At sixty, the 
vessel still floats, and you are in the cabin. At 
seventy, you, with a few fellow-passengers, are on a 
raft. At eighty, you are on a spar, to which, possi- 
bly, one, or two, or three friends of about your own 
age are still clinging. After that, you must expect 
soon to find yourself alone, if you are still floating, 
with only a life-preser^^er to keep your old white- 
bearded chin above water. 

My friends — contemporary' ones — are all gone 

pretty much. James Clarke was the one I miss 

most. W^iUiam Amorj^ I saw a good deal of in these 

last years. Asa Gray I liked exceedingly, though I 

[ 197 1 



DR. HOLMES'S BOSTON 
did not see him very often. Herman Inches I go to 
see pretty often, but he is gradually wearing out, 
after outliving almost everybody who expected to 
go to his funeral. 

You make fun of our Class meeting [1889]. It was 
not very exhilarating, but we got through it pretty 
well. Two who were there last year were missing. 
. . . There were six of us. . . Stickney and Smith 
were both stone deaf, and kept up some kind of tele- 
phony with each other. I read them a poem in which 
were two lines that I can remember: "So ends 'The 
Boys' a lifelong play;" and "Farewell! I let the 
curtain fall." The drama was really carried out very 
well. All kinds of characters were represented, and 
we appeared on the stage in larger numbers for a 
longer time than any class of our generation. . . . 

How strange it is to see the sons of our contem- 
poraries getting gray, and their grandchildren get- 
ting engaged and married. I take the lahuntur anni 
without many eheus. The truth is. Nature has her 
anodynes, and Old Age carries one of them in his 
pocket. It is some kind of narcotic; it dulls our sen- 
sibiHty; it tends to make us sleepy and indifferent; 
and, in lightening our responsibilities (which Presi- 
dent Walker spoke of as one of our chief blessings), 
[ 198 1 



FAREWELL, BOSTON 
rids us of many of our worries. I don't think you 
grow old, and in many ways I do not feel as if I did. 
But sight and hearing won't listen to any nonsense. 

The class of 1829 at Harvard College, of which I 
am a member, graduated, according to the triennial, 
fifty-nine in number. It is sixty years, then, since 
that time; and as they were, on an average, about 
twenty years old, those who survive must have 
reached fourscore years. Of the fifty-nme graduates 
ten only are Hving, or were at the last accounts; one 
in six very nearly. In the first ten years after gradu- 
ation, our third decade, when we were between 
twenty and thirty years old, we lost three members, 
— about one in twenty; between the ages of thirty 
and forty, eight died, — one in seven of those the 
decade began with; from forty to fifty, only two, — 
or one in twenty-four; from fifty to sixty, eight, — 
or one in six; from sixty to seventy, fifteen, — or 
two out of every five; from seventy to eighty, 
twelve, — or one in two. The greatly increased 
mortaUty which began with the seventh decade 
went on steadily increasing. At sixty we come 
"within range of the rifle-pits," to borrow an ex- 
pression from my friend ^Yeir Mitchell, 
f 199 1 



DR. HOLMES'S BOSTON 

At the last annual dinner every effort was made 
to bring all the survivors of the class together. Si3j> 
of the ten living members were there, — six old 
men in place of the thirty or forty classmates who 
surrounded the long, oval table in 1859, when I 
asked, "Has any old fellow got mixed with the 
boys?" — "boys" whose tongues were as the vi- 
brating leaves of the forest; whose talk was like the 
voice of many waters; whose laugh was as the 
breaking of mighty waves upon the seashore. 
Among the six at our late dinner was our first 
scholar, and the thorough-bred and accomplished 
engineer who held the city of Lawrence in his brain 
before it spread itself out along the banks of the 
Merrimac. There, too, was the poet whose National 
Hymn, "My Country, 't is of thee," is known to 
more millions, and dearer to many of them, than all 
the other songs written since the Psalms of David. 
Four of our six were clergymen; the engineer and 
the present writer completed the list. Were we 
melancholy .f^ Did we talk of graveyards and epi- 
taphs.? No, — we remembered our dead tenderly, 
serenely, feeling deeply what we had lost in those 
who but a little while ago were with us. . . . We were 
not the moping, complaining graybeards that many 
[ 200 ] 



FAREWELL, BOSTON 

miglit suppose we must have been. We had been 
favored with the blessing of long life. We had seen 
the drama well into its fifth act. The sun still 
warmed us, the air was still grateful and life-giving. 

Well, let the present do its best, 

We trust our Maker for the rest, 

As on our way we plod; 

Our souls, full dressed in fleshly suits, 

Love air and sunshine, flowers and fruits, 

The daisies better than their roots 

Beneath the grassy sod. 

Not bed-time yet! The full-blown flower 
Of all the year — this evening hour — 
With friendship's flame is bright; 
Life is still sweet, the heavens are fair. 
Though fields are brown and woods are bare, 
And many a joy is left to share 
Before we say Good-night! 

I have sometimes thought that I loved so well the 
accidents of this temporary terrestrial residence, its 
endeared localities, its precious affections, its pleas- 
ing variety of occupation, its alternations of excited 
and gratified curiosity, and whatever else comes 
nearest to the longings of the natural man, that I 
might be wickedly homesick in a far-off spiritual 
realm where such toys are done with. 
[ 201 ] 



DR. HOLMES'S BOSTON 
In whatever world I may find myself, I hope I 
shall always love our poor little spheroid, so long my 
home, which some kind angel may point out to me 
as a gilded globule swimming in the sunlight far 
away. After walking the streets of pure gold in the 
New Jerusalem, might not one Hke a short vacation, 
to visit the well-remembered green fields and flow- 
ery meadows .f^ 

[Throughout his life Dr. Holmes was fond of church- 
going, and he was a regular attendant at the services in 
"King's Chapel.] 

I am a regular church-goer. I should go for va- 
rious reasons, if I did not love it; but I am happy 
enough to find great pleasure in the midst of devout 
multitudes, whether I can accept all their creeds or 
not. One place of worship comes nearer than the 
rest to my ideal standard, and to this it was that I 
carried our yoimg girl. . . . 

My natural Sunday home is King's Chapel, where 
a good and amiable and acceptable preacher tries 
to make us better, with a purity and sincerity which 
we admire and love. In that church I have wor- 
shipped for half a century, — there I listened to Dr. 
Greenwood, to Ephraim Peabody, often to James 
Walker, and to other holy and wise men who have 
[ 202 ] 



''r' 



'B" '■ 



King's Chapel, 1860 



FAREWELL, BOSTON 

served from time to time. There on the fifteenth of 
June 1840, 1 was married, there my children were all 
christened, from that church the dear companion of 
so many blessed years was buried. In her seat I must 
sit, and through its door I hope to be carried to my 
resting-place. 

Is it a weanling's weakness for the past 

That in the stormy, rebel-breeding town, 
Swept clean of reHcs by the leveUing blast. 
Still keeps our gray old chapel's name of "King's," 
Still to its outworn symbols fondly clings, — 
Its unchurched mitres and its empty crown? 

AU vanished! It were idle to complain 

That ere the fruits shall come the flowers must faU; 
Yet somewhat we have lost amidst our gain, 
Some rare ideals time may not restore, — 
The charm of courtly breeding, seen no more. 

And reverence, dearest ornament of all. 

The middle-aged and young men have left com- 
paratively faint impressions in my memory, but 
how grandly the procession of the old clergymen 
who filled our pulpit from time to time, and passed 
the day under our roof, marches before my closed 
eyes. 

The pulpit used to lay down the law to the pews; 
at the present time, it is of more consequence what 
[ 203 ] 



DR. HOLMES'S BOSTON 

the pews think than what the minister does, for the 
obvious reason that the pews can change their min- 
ister, and often do, whereas the minister cannot 
change the pews, or can do so only to a very Hmited 
extent. The preacher's garment is cut according to 
the pattern of his hearers, for the most part. 

It is natural enough to cling to life. We are used 
to atmospheric existence, and can hardly conceive 
of ourselves except as breathing creatures. We have 
never tried any other mode of being, or, if we have, 
we have forgotten all about it, whatever Words- 
worth's grand ode may tell us we may remember. 
Heaven itself must be an experiment to every hu- 
man soul which shall find itself there. It may take 
time for an earth-born saint to become acclimated 
to the celestial ether, — that is, if time can be said 
to exist for a disembodied spirit. We are all sen- 
tenced to capital punishment for the crime of living, 
and though the condemned cell of our earthly exis- 
tence is but a narrow and bare dwelling-place, we 
have adjusted ourselves to it, and made it tolerably 
comfortable for the little while we are to be confined 
in it. The prisoner of Chillon 

"regained [his] freedom with a sigh," — 
[ 204 ] 



FAREWELL, BOSTON 

and a tender-hearted mortal might be pardoned for 
looking back, like the poor lady who was driven 
from her dwelling-place by fire and brimstone, at 
the home he was leaving for the "undiscovered 
country." 

The mysteries of our lives and ourselves resolve 
themselves very slowly with the progress of years. 
Every decade lifts the curtain, which hides us from 
ourselves, a little further, and lets a new light upon 
what was dark and unintelligible. 

How few things there are that do not change their 
whole aspect in the course of a single generation! 
The landscape around us is wholly different. Even 
the outlines of the hills that surround us are changed 
by the creeping of the villages with their spires and 
school-houses up their sides. The sky remains the 
same, and the ocean. A few old churchyards look 
very much as they used to, except, of course in Bos- 
ton, where the gravestones have been rooted up and 
planted in rows with walks between them, to the 
utter disgrace and ruin of our most venerated ceme- 
taries. The Registry of Deeds and the Probate 
Office show us the same old folios, where we can 
[ 205 1 



DR. HOLMES'S BOSTON 

read our grandfather's title to his estate (if we had a 
grandfather and he happened to ovm anything) and 
see how many pots and kettles there were in his 
kitchen by the inventory of his personal property. 
. . . The graveyard and the stage are pretty much 
the onh^ places where you can expect to find your 
friends as you left them five and twenty or fifty 
years ago. 

The mossy marbles rest 

On the Hps that he has prest 

In their bloom, 
And the names he loved to hear 
Have been carved for many a year 

On the tomb. 

And if I should Uve to be 
The last leaf upon the tree 

In the spring, 
Let them smile, as I do now, 
At the old forsaken bough 

\Miere I cling. 

This is the season for old churchyards. . . . The 
Boston ones have been ruined by uprooting and 
transplanting the gravestones. But the old Cam- 
bridge burial-groimd is still inviolate; as are the one 
in the edge of Watertown, beyond Mount Auburn, 
and the most interesting in some respects of all, that 
[ 206 ] 



FAREWELL, BOSTON 

at Dorchester, where they show great stones laid on 
the early graves to keep the wolves from acting like 
hyenas. I make a pilgrimage to it from time to time 
to see that little Submit sleeps in peace, and read 
the tender Unes that soothed the heart of the Pil- 
grim mother two hmidred years ago and more: 

'* Submit submitted to her heavenly king 
Being a flower of that aeternal spring, 
Near 3 yeares old she dyed in heaven to waite 
The yeare was sixteen hundred 48." 

Moimt Aubm-n wants a centurj^ to hallow it, but 
is beginning to soften with time a Uttle. Many of 
us remember it as yet unbroken by the spade, be- 
fore Miss Hannah Adams went and lay do\\Ti there 
under the turf, alojie, — "first tenant of Mount 
Auburn." The thunder-storms do not frighten the 
poor little woman now as they used to in those 
early days when I remember her among the li^Tng. 
There are many names of those whom we have 
loved and honored on the marbles of that fair 
cemetery. 

Perhaps you sometimes wander in through the 
iron gates of the Copp's Hill burial-ground. You 
love to stroll round among the graves that crowd 
[ 207 1 



DR. HOLMES'S BOSTON 

each other in the thickly peopled soil of that breezy 
summit. You love to lean on the freestone slab 
which lies over the bones of the Mathers, — to read 
the epitaph of stout William Clark, "Despiser of 
Sorry Persons and httle Actions," to stand by the 
stone grave of sturdy Daniel Malcolm and look upon 
the old sphntered slab that tells the old rebel's 
story, — to kneel by the triple stone that says how 
the three Worthylakes, father, mother, and young 
daughter, died on the same day and lie buried there; 
a mystery; the subject of a moving ballad, by the 
late Benjamin Franklin, — as may be seen in his 
autobiography, which will explain the secret of the 
triple gravestone; though the old philosopher has 
made a mistake, unless the stone is wrong. 

The Little Gentleman lies where he longed to lie, 
among the old names and the old bones of the old 
Boston people. At the foot of his resting-place is 
the river, alive with the wings and antennae of its 
colossal water-insects; over opposite are the great 
war-ships, and the heavy guns, which, when they 
roar, shake the soil in which he lies; and in the 
steeple of Christ Church, hard by, are the sweet 
chimes which are the Boston boy's Ranz des Vaches, 
whose echoes follow him all the world over. 
[ 208 1 



The Old North Church, Salem Street 



FAREWELL, BOSTON 
How old was I, ... I the recipient of all these 
favors and honors? I had cleared the eight barred 
gate, which few come in sight of, and fewer, far 
fewer, go over, a year before. I was a trespasser on 
the domain belonging to another generation. . . . 
After that leap over the tall barrier, it looks like a 
kind of impropriety to keep on as if one were still of 
a reasonable age. Sometimes it seems to me almost 
of the nature of a misdemeanor to be wandering 
about in the preserve which the fleshless gate- 
keeper guards so jealously. 

[Dr. Holmes was able to take his usual walks until 
within a few days of his death. He had failed gently 
and almost imperceptibly and seemingly in accordance 
with his own word-pictures of Nature's gradual rehn- 
quishment of her physical possessions. He was up and 
about the house on the last day, passing away peace- 
fully in his chair on Oct. 7, 1894. Two days later he 
was buried from King's Chapel. In his last letters to 
Whittier, Dr. Holmes sets forth his cheerful and hope- 
ful view of old age, and affectionately clasps hands with 
the dear friend in whose company he is "nearing the 
snow-line":] 

My dear Whittier, — Here I am at your side 
among the octogenarians. At seventy we are ob- 
jects of veneration, at eighty of curiosity, at ninety 
[ 209 1 



DR. HOLMES'S BOSTON 

of wonder; and if we reach a hundred we are candi- 
dates for a side-show attached to Barnum's great 
exhibition. . . . 

Old age at best is lonely, and the process of chang- 
ing one's whole suit of friends and acquaintances 
has its moments when one feels naked and shivers. 

I have this forenoon answered a letter from the 
grandson of a classmate and received a \'isit from 
the daughter of another classmate, the "Sweet 
Singer" of the class of '29. So you see I have been 
contemplating the leafless boughs and the brown 
turf in the garden of my memory. 

Not less do I prize my newer friendships. 

I hope dear '^Miittier, that you find much to enjoy 
in the midst of all the lesser trials which old age 
must bring with it. You have kind friends all 
around you, and the love and homage of your fel- 
low-countrj^men as few have enjoyed them, with 
the deep satisfaction of knowing that you have 
earned them, not merely by the gifts of your genius, 
but by the noble life which has ripened without a 
flaw into a grand and serene old age. I never see 
my name coupled with yours, as it often is now- 
adays, without feeling honored by finding myself 
[ 210 1 



FAREWELL, BOSTON 

in such company, and wishing that I were more 
worthy of it. 

[The Doctor's final words of appreciation offered to 
his friend "VMiittier may well be re-echoed on his own 
behalf, for they were as apphcable to the one who ut- 
tered them, as to him to whom they were addressed by 
the fellow-octogenarian.] 

I congratulate you upon ha^dng climbed another 
glacier and crossed another crevasse in your ascent 
of the white summit which already begins to see the 
morning twihght of the coming centui^'. A life so 
well filled as yours has been cannot be too long for 
your fellow-men. In their affections you are secure, 
whether you are with them here, or near them in 
some higher life than theirs. I hope your years have 
not become a burden, so that you are tired of U^'ing. 
At our age we must live chiefly in the past : happy is 
he who has a past like yoiu's to look back upon. . . . 
We are lonely, very lonely, in these last years. 
The image which I have used before this in writuig 
to you recurs once more to my thought. We were 
on deck together as we began the voyage of life two 
generations ago . . . the craft which held us began 
going to pieces, until a few of us were left on the 
raft pieced together of its fragments. And now the 
[ ^211 1 



DR. HOLMES'S BOSTON 

raft has at last parted and you and I are left cling- 
ing to the solitary spar, which is all that still remains 
afloat of the sunken vessel. . . . Long may it be 
before you leave a world where your influence has 
been so beneficent, where your example has been 
such an inspiration, where you are so truly loved, 
and where your presence is a perpetual benedic- 
tion. 

If the time comes when you must lay down the 
fiddle and the bow, because your fingers are too 
stiff, and drop the ten-foot sculls because your arms 
are too weak, and, after dallying a while with eye- 
glasses, come at last to the undisguised reality of 
spectacles, if the time comes when the fire of life we 
spoke of has burned so low that where the flames 
reverberated there is only the sombre stain of regret, 
and where its coals glowed, only the white ashes 
that cover the embers of memory, — don't let your 
heart grow cold, and you may carry cheerfulness 
and love with you into the teens of your second 
century, if you can last so long. 

Dear faithful reader, whose patient eyes have 
followed my reports through these long months, you 
and I are about to part company. 
[ 212 ] 



FAREWELL, BOSTON 

The Play is over. While the light 

Yet Ungers in the darkening hall, 
I come to say a last Good-night 

Before the final Exeunt all. 

We gathered once, a joyous throng : 
The jovial toasts went gayly round; 

With jest, and laugh, and shout, and song. 
We made the floors and walls resound. 

We come with feeble steps and slow, 

A Uttle band of four or five, 
Left from the wrecks of long ago, 

Still pleased to find ourselves alive. 

Why mourn that we, the favored few 
Whom grasping Time so long has spared 

Life's sweet illusions to pursue. 
The common lot of age have shared? 

In every pulse of Friendship's heart 
There breeds unfelt a throb of pain, — 

One hour must rend its Hnks apart, 

Though years on years have forged the chain. 



So ends "The Boys," — a hfelong play. 

We too must hear the Prompter's call 
To fairer scenes and brighter day : 

Farewell ! I let the curtain fall. 

The curtain has now fallen, and I show myself a 
moment before it to thank my audience and say 
[ 213 ] 



DR. HOLMES'S BOSTON 
farewell. ... I hope I have not wholly disappointed 
those who have been so kind to my predecessors. 
To you, Beloved, who have never failed to cut 
the leaves which hold my record, who have never 
nodded over its pages, who have never hesitated in 
your allegiance, who have greeted me with unfailing 
smiles and part from me with unfeigned regrets, to 
you I look my last adieu as I bow myseH out of 
sight, trusting my poor efforts to your always kind 
remembrance. 

Slow toiling upward from the misty vale, 

I leave the bright enamelled zones below; 

No more for me their beauteous bloom shall glow, 
Their lingering sweetness load the morning gale; 
Few are the slender flowerets, scentless, pale, 

That on their ice-clad stems all trembling blow 

Along the margin of unmelting snow; 
Yet with unsaddened voice thy verge I hail. 

White realm of peace above the flowering line; 
Welcome thy frozen domes, thy rocky spires! 

O 'er thee undimmed the moon-girt planets shine, 
On thy majestic altars fade the fires 
That filled the air with smoke of vain desires. 

And all the unclouded blue of heaven is thine! 

THE END 



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